“Sometimes the classroom can be such a formal atmosphere,” said Moore, who teaches theology at Fordham, along with Seitz, her husband. “Just seeing them lying on the floor with my dog, petting her, and telling us about terrible high school summer jobs they’ve had, just being more human—it was so sweet.” 

This summer, Moore served as a faculty mentor to three undergraduates participating in Fordham’s summer research programs: Laura Oldfather, a theology student at Fordham College at Lincoln Center who is revitalizing Ignatian spirituality for a new generation; Amara Overmyer, an English student at Fordham College at Lincoln Center who is writing stories about a local nonprofit; and Christopher Ciaccio, a philosophy student at Fordham College at Rose Hill who is imagining alternatives to capitalism using 20th-century French mystical thought. (The students’ research is, respectively, funded by Fordham College at Lincoln Center, the Center for Community Engaged Learning, and Fordham College at Rose Hill.) 

In mid-July, Moore and Seitz invited the students to their home in Hastings-on-Hudson for dinner, along with their theology colleague Stephanie Arel. While eating a homemade meal prepared by Moore—roasted chicken, potatoes, goat cheese salad, and watermelon—the students and scholars shared their research and the things they care about.

“They all are readers, writers, and thinkers who are doing super cool work this summer, and it was great to have a chance to think and learn together,” said Moore, who hosted students at her home last spring, too.

Ignatian Spirituality for Gen Z

Oldfather, who is originally from Wisconsin, is a theology major. She said she is studying how scholars are adapting the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola to different cultures and audiences, particularly women, who were “often left out of the history of the Jesuits.” 

“I’m looking at the work that people have done … and focusing on how this impacts a modern-day Fordham college student, like how the exercises would be applicable. As part of my research, I am writing a translation, updating some of the language. A lot of it is changing pronouns in places, making it gender-neutral. In some places, the language is very imperial or colonial, just because of the context of it being written in the 1500s,” said Oldfather, who will present her research at Fordham’s spring symposium next year. 

An Internship That Combines Writing and Humanitarian Work 

Overmyer, an English student from California, is a summer intern at an East Harlem nonprofit that helps vulnerable families and children, where she is developing website biographies for the organization’s nearly 60 staff and board members. 

At the dinner, she shared her work with the other students, who, in turn, broadened her perspective on theology and philosophy. (Her favorite part of the get-together, however, was meeting Moore and Seitz’s three-and-a-half year old golden retriever, Mosey: “I have slobber and hair all over my skirt that I wore that day, but it was worth it,” she said.) 

Moore said that she and her husband love seeing students in their “full humanity.” 

“We are, as humanities scholars and lecturers and students, studying human culture and civilization,” said Moore, “and it’s so much more interesting to do that when we show up in our full humanity, too.”

CSTEP and STEP are programs that provide support to New York high school and college students from underrepresented backgrounds, including academic support and counseling, scholarships, and research opportunities. (CSTEP is for undergraduates, while STEP is for middle and high school students.) 

Fetal Development, Eel Health, and Neurodegenerative Disease 

Students in Fordham’s programs presented their research to judges at the programs’ regional student conferences and were recognized for the quality of their projects. 

Three CSTEP students, who are all undergraduates at Fordham College at Rose Hill, were honored at the 29th annual CSTEP statewide student conference on April 16 in Lake George, New York: Daphne Buitron, a May graduate who earned her bachelor’s degree in sociology, won honorable mention in the natural sciences category for her project “Influence of COVID-19 Infection during Pregnancy on Infant Neurodevelopment,” conducted through a summer scholars program at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine; Latif Diaoune, a rising senior who studies general science and sociology, won 4th place in the natural sciences category for his project “H(eel)ing Our Rivers: An Assessment of River Health and a Survey of the American Eel,” conducted through Project TRUE; and Isaac Mullings, a rising senior who studies psychology on the pre-med track, won third place in the health sciences category for his project “Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and Biomarkers of Disease Progression,” conducted through Columbia University’s PrIMER program. 

In addition, Laura Maca Vela, a high school senior at West End Secondary School in Manhattan, won third place in the biological sciences category for her research project “TLS Polymerase Activity in B. Subtilis in MMS” at the 23rd annual STEP statewide student conference in Albany on March 26. She conducted her research with Elizabeth Thrall, Ph.D., an assistant chemistry professor at Fordham. 

A Bronx Native Studies the Bronx River 

Diaoune, a Bronx native and commuter student, studied the Bronx River, the only freshwater river in New York City. In a project conducted with Project TRUE, he researched the impact of macroplastics and other pollutants on the American eel, a keystone species that lives in the Bronx River. 

“We saw the result of accelerated plastic production combined with [poor]waste disposal management, which is ultimately causing the oceans and rivers to suffer,” said Diaoune, who caught and measured local eels and plastics. “These consequences are felt by marine species like the American eel.”

The purpose of his project was to get his hands wet with research, said Diaoune, a pre-med student who is considering becoming a surgeon. He learned how to run his own experiment and mentor younger scientists. (Diaoune supervised several research assistants who are high school students in the Bronx.) 

Diaoune has presented his research before, at a Project TRUE symposium held at the American Museum of Natural History, but he said the CSTEP symposium was different. 

“I realized how big CSTEP really is,” said Diaoune. “It’s a huge community.”

Junior Eric Purisic examined the U.N.’s role in the Feb. 10 class virtual presentation, while Senior Jade Crichlow presented on the actions of artists. Both were identified by Associate Professor Bentley Anderson, S.J., for research they conducted in his South African history course.

“Jade and Eric both demonstrated the breadth and the depth of the international community’s stand against racial segregation and human degradation,” said Father Anderson. “It was satisfying for me, as the instructor, to see the quality of their research and analysis as they engaged a morally and ethically challenging topic.”

Purisic laid out the historic foundations of apartheid’s history. He noted that beginning in 1948, the South African government had set up a racial separation system that divided the society by white, Black, colored, and Asian. The system determined who one could marry, employment, and educational opportunities. Challenging the system could result in “repression, violence, and death,” he said.

“The first calls to address the apartheid at the U.N. were specifically headed by India,” he said, noting that India was concerned solely with how apartheid was oppressing their own minority population in the country, not the 80% Black majority.

As South Africa was a founding member of the U.N., few of the permanent members of the security council were willing to sanction the nation. Strategic Cold War alliances also played a role, he said. For example, NASA maintained land-based arrays to monitor space flight but were also used to surveil adversaries. Though Purisic uncovered plenty of speeches that denounced apartheid, he found little that fully addressed the specific methods.

That changed after the Sharpeville massacre on March 21, 1960, which began as a protest against the police use of passes to control the movement of Black workers.“Sixty-nine protesters were killed, many were shot in the back while running away, scores were wounded, and more than 18,000 people were arrested,” he said. “This was so gruesome that the U.N. finally decided to start to change its tactics and policy.”

On April 1, 1960, the U.N. released Resolution 134, which called on the South African government to abandon apartheid. Over the years, the UN passed voluntary resolutions to economically sanction, embargo, and cut off diplomatic ties with South Africa,  but that due to lack of compliance and enforcement the measures failed, he said. But it took 29 years for the U.N. to publish a “playbook” for reimagining a nation without apartheid; five years later, in 1994, it was finally abolished.

“I think it brings up some issues in general of the U.N. policies and their ability to deal with systems of oppression and racism,” he said.

Crichlow showed how outside pressure from artists helped shape the narrative of South African repression.  She focused on the Artists Against Apartheid movement that began in 1954, when Anglican Archbishop Trevor Huddleston called for a cultural boycott of the nation. The movement didn’t gain steam until the late 1960s, she said. For its part, the South African government responded with propaganda that falsely proclaimed Sun City, a well-known gambling resort controlled at the time by South Africa, allowed for mixed-race performances.

The catch was all interracial performances needed a permit first. Artists such as Frank Sinatra took advantage of this opportunity and in 1981, he reaped $1.79 million for a series of performances there, she said. The U.N. responded by creating a register of entertainers who performed in the country.

“The U.N. said that this was not supposed to be a blacklist, but it did act that way … eventually Great Britain and Northern Ireland also banned artists who appeared on the list from performing in their countries,” said Crichlow.

Not wanting to be associated with the repressive regime, 100 artists announced they would not perform there, she said.

From a 1990 African National Congress fundraiser in New York City sponsored by Eddie Murphy and Spike Lee to the chanting the name of slain activist Steve Biko at concerts to The Specials 1984 hit “Free Nelson Mandela,” artists helped foster boycotts of the nation.

“This made me hopeful of future movements that morals can weigh more heavily than money,” she said.

Crichlow said she was intrigued by how artists bypassed traditional media streams to get the truth about apartheid to their audiences through art and music, without the benefit of social media available today.

She drew a clear distinction between boycotting and cancel culture, the latter of which she said it is a trend that forces an offender to apologize, after which “we forgot exactly what happened before.”

“I think that boycotting can still work,” she said. “I think of a lot of the artists that stood up for Black Lives Matter, and how people took it to the streets, made sure they weren’t just saying ‘Black Lives Matter.’ They showed it through their actions.”

Next in the Series:

Associate Professor Laurie Lambert, Ph.D. said two students from her class will give presentations on Friday, March 26, at 5 p.m.  Jemina Molines will hold forth on Haiti and Alyssa Cantrel will discuss Jamaica. 

But thanks to a recently created named research fund, Chandra, an economics Ph.D. student in the Graduate School Arts and Sciences (GSAS), will be able to continue the research for her dissertation, which focuses on the causes of education gaps in her native India.

Good Motivation

Speaking from her hometown near New Delhi, Chandra said the Donna Smolens Summer Research Fellowship in Economics, of which she is the second recipient, will help her manage her living expenses so she can continue to pursue her research without getting a paid job.

“I was checking my email almost every day since I came home, and it was really exciting to get some good news,” she said, noting that she has all the data she needs to work on what will be a chapter in her dissertation.

“It’s good motivation to get it done.”

Summer Funding Is Critical

Chandra’s is a story that is becoming more common, as GSAS has expanded its summer funding opportunities with the help of generous benefactors like Smolens. Melissa Labonte, Ph.D., interim dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, said that because most Ph.D.-level programs are only funded in nine-month intervals, summer fellowships are critical. GSAS currently has 24 endowed scholarships and fellowships that benefit students enrolled across 35 doctoral and master’s degree programs.

“Every single internship or opportunity a student might otherwise avail themselves this time of year is drying up very quickly because of the pandemic, so right now we’re in the midst of enhancing the support we provide students in the summer,” she said.

“We want to them be able to continue to make progress on their research, and we also want them to get mentoring support.”

‘It Made My Career’

Smolens said she funded the fellowship because the help she received as a Fordham student was instrumental in her success. After graduating from Fordham College at Rose Hill in 1979 and GSAS in 1981, she embarked on what would become a long and thriving career in finance. She retired in 2020 as a senior adviser with Insight Partners, a leading global private equity and venture capital firm.

Her undergraduate studies at Fordham were made possible with a partial scholarship and she attended graduate school with aid from William Hogan, S.J., the founder of the Fordham Industrial Economics Research Institute. Father Hogan hired her to be his research assistant, and when it came time to look for a job, career services arranged for her to interview with the bank Manufacturers Hanover Trust.

“I think I was the only Fordham person to get an offer, and it made my career, no question,” she said.

“How did I do that? The maturity and experience I got from working with Father Hogan those years allowed me to stand out against other students. Fordham really prepared me really well, and this is why I wanted to give back.”

Investigating Bitcoin

In addition to the Smolens fellowship that was first offered last year, this spring GSAS offered for the first time a Dominick Salvatore Summer Research Fellowship in Economics, named for Dominick Salvatore, Ph.D., currently a Distinguished Professor of Economics. It was funded by Sherif Assef, FCRH ’81, GSAS ’82, ’94, Luca Bonardi, GSAS ’99, and Selena Schneider, GSAS ’01.

While Chandra’s research is focused on analyzing a unique dataset from India on factors affecting education, such as family and school inputs, Janhavi Tripathi, the recipient of the Salvatore Fellowship, is training his sights on global cryptocurrency markets. Because currencies such as Bitcoin are still relatively new, there are still questions about whether market prices for the cost of individual units of the currencies reflect all publicly available relevant information and would be considered “efficient.”

In addition to measuring whether markets are efficient, Tripathi also researches how Blockchain technology can be used to make global remittances fast and more reliable. The movement of money from wealthy nations such as the United States to developing countries like India is expected to increase to $1.03 trillion by 2022, he said.

“Financial inclusion is one of the big gains from this. If Blockchain technology can be used to help global remittances, a lot of time that can be saved and a real gap can be bridged,” said Tripathi, who is also using his grant to cover living expenses.

Retired Professor Gives Back

Bridging gaps is something that Terrence Tilley, Ph.D., understands as well. Tilley, a professor emeritus and retired chair of Fordham’s Theology Department, has for the past year funded the Theology Graduate Student Development Fund. Rather than fund summer research, it funds travel for graduate students to either conduct research or present findings at academic conferences, such as the annual Leuven Encounters in Systematic Theology conference in Belgium that Fordham theology students have traveled to over the years.

Tilley has first-hand knowledge of the value that travel adds to research. In 1974, he traveled to England to do archival research and interviews as part of his doctoral dissertation, while his wife, the late Maureen Tilley, Ph.D., stayed at home with their daughter.

“Maureen and I were very poor grad students, but we scraped together as much money as we had, and I flew to England, where I found a manuscript that supposedly never existed, or had been lost,” he said.

The manuscript, an essay titled “On Revelation,” was written by Ian T. Ramsey, who was Bishop of Durham from 1966 to 1972. Tilley was able to cite it in his well-received dissertation and would go on to publish 10 books and nearly 100 academic papers over a career spanning four decades. But he noted that on one occasion while he was away, Maureen and their daughter had to settle for popcorn dusted with parmesan cheese for dinner until payday came the next day.

“I hadn’t thought of that adventure in terms of funding this graduate fellowship, but it may have been in my subconscious,” he said, laughing.

“Ramsey’s widow not only let me interview her for 10 hours but put me up overnight. I encountered such generosity on this trip, not only from her, but from other people. It was a remarkable experience, and to be in a position to be able to contribute to others being able to travel and doing research, it makes me feel good,” he said.

Labonte noted that all the donors who funded the fellowships did so before the COVID-19 outbreak.

“I don’t know if they even understood how incredibly impactful their gifts were going to be, especially this summer,” she said.

“It brings into stark relief the value of having engaged philanthropic leaders for your school in good times and bad. Certainly in times like these, students really need that support more than ever.”

Now, student-developed software that works with the camera technology promises to help conservationists better understand how to protect future generations of the toads so that they can continue to thrive in their natural habitat in Tanzania. Next year, two more students will pick up the project.

From Africa to the Bronx, and Back Again

Discovered in 1996, the Kihansi spray toad lived in a five-acre microhabitat created by the spray of waterfalls in the Kihansi Gorge, which came under threat with the construction of a nearby dam that dramatically changed the habitat and decreased the size of the mist zone. The species was last seen in the wild in 2005 and was declared extinct-in-the-wild by 2009 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, likely due to the environmental changes and the emergence of a deadly fungus.

As the toad population declined, a partnership between the Bronx Zoo and the Tanzanian government, and the World Bank facilitated the collection of 499 spray toads to be brought to the Bronx to initiate an off-site conservation program. Custom microhabitats replicating their home in Tanzania were built in bio-secure facilities at the Bronx Zoo and later at the Toledo Zoo where they successfully bred the toads in the hopes of reintroducing them to the wild.

Back in Tanzania, the government managed the Lower Kihansi Environment Management Project to create a gravity-fed misting system. The project resuscitated the toads’ habitat and in 2010 the first 200 toads were returned to Tanzania to a breeding facility at University of Dar es Salaam. The first of several reintroductions to the gorge occurred in 2013, making them the first amphibian species to be reintroduced after being declared extinct in the wild.

Enter Fordham

The Fordham piece of the project began about five years ago when Kelly Cunningham, FCRH ’14, worked with James MacDonall, Ph.D., professor emeritus of psychology, to study the pecking behavior of pigeons. At the time, contact switches and touch-screen sensors were the state of the art for recording pigeons pecking at a target as part of psychological learning experiments, but a disadvantage of that simple mechanism is that when the pigeons’ beaks began to hurt, they stopped pecking at the switches. Further complicating things was the fact that this technology missed when pigeons were distracted or facing the wrong way, said Lyons.

As a computer scientist under the tutelage of Lyons, Cunningham worked in Fordham’s Computer Vision Lab to institute the use of the Microsoft Kinect sensor for the study. The Kinect is a motion-sensing input system initially developed for Xbox. Its cameras presented a flexible and inexpensive image-based approach to solving the tired-beak problem, as well as a way to observe behaviors beyond pecking.

Lyons and Cunningham wrote a paper published in a Psychometric Society journal in 2014 on their findings, which caught the eye of Avi Shuter at the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Bronx Zoo. Shuter is the Senior Wild Animal Keeper in the zoo’s Department of Herpetology.

He was researching the behavior of the Kihansi spray toad, and he thought the technology might be helpful in the zoo’s efforts to better understand the animal. He reached out to Lyons, who in turn put Armando Califano, FCRH ’17, GSAS ’19, on the case.

Taking the Toads to Task

With the help of an undergraduate research grant from Fordham College at Rose Hill, Califano refined the tracking system developed by Cunningham, shifting the camera from Microsoft Kinect to the Intel RealSense, which had more accurate depth perception. But Califano could only take the project so far before entering graduate school, and the experiment was put on hold.  That’s when Philip Bal, FCRH ’19, came into the picture.

In Bal’s junior year he decided to shift his focus from biology to computer science—making him a perfect candidate to pick up the project.  Over the past year and a half, Bal wrote new software that would use the camera to track the toads and generate behavior analytics, ultimately by distinguishing toads from other moving and stationary elements in their tanks. With Lyons overseeing the computer technology and Shuter overseeing the biology, Bal was able to further develop software that responded to the needs of zookeepers.

A Tiny Target

The average size of the toad is no more than an inch, at most. The tanks that they are kept in are the typical fish tank size, about two feet wide, two feet deep, and about three feet high. The camera sits an inch and a half away from the glass. Researchers choose a subsection of the tank to focus on, just a few dozen cubed inches along the bottom or the top. A focal length is established to determine how deep into the tank the camera will take measurements. The camera has two lenses: one that’s recording color, and infrared that records movement.

“We have to do a whole bunch of calculations, try to figure what’s actually a toad moving and eliminate the noise, like moving leaves,” said Bal. “The first thing we do to track toads is to match them to a particular movement.”

Providing a More Accurate Picture

The group gathered approximately two days of footage that took up four and a half terabytes of stored data. Up until then, previous behavioral studies relied on direct observations of toads by scientists at predetermined time intervals. Those projects were an important start, but this new technology and software will give researchers a more complete view of toad behavior, said Shuter.

“Previous studies almost didn’t see any toads hopping,” said Shuter, who worked with the Fordham students and Lyons. “This can be a pretty shy species of toad that hides or stays still when you walk by. A lot of their behavioral repertoire also seems to be made up of split-second movements, like quick calls or hops. So, that’s part of the reason why I thought that a system where a computer could catch all that would give us a more accurate idea of what’s going on.”

One of the things that distinguish the Fordham research from other studies on these toads was that the technology and software were new.

“This is from the ground up; it didn’t exist before,” said Shuter, adding that as a result, the project is more complex than previous studies. “I’m amazed that it has only taken this long to get to where we’ve gotten since it’s totally from scratch.”

Bal said that the project taught him quite a bit about programming.

“I learned what I was capable of, I created thousands of lines of code I never thought I would be able to write,” he said. “This is one of my favorite things to talk about, my passion project.”

Shuter said that when the zoo first recovered the toads in the year 2000, the focus at the time was to build up a colony in captivity that could be relied upon in the event that the wild population continued to decline. The zoo was able to bring the number of toads to almost 2,000 toads.

“The struggle back then was to make more, make more, make more, and we didn’t publish research about their natural history or biology, aside from what would keep them alive, healthy, and breeding in zoos,” said Shuter. “Now, we’re a little bit calmer and things are going well in Tanzania, and we have a good handle on how to keep them alive. So now, we’re starting to look more into, ‘what’s their behavior like?’”

At a recent meeting at the zoo, Bal presented some interactions he observed in the data, including “meetings” of toads, characterized by a certain distance between the toads and the amount of time spent together.

Shuter plans to continue observing these interactions, and also plans to examine fighting behaviors and look to tell them apart from mating—also referred to as amplexing.

And he may get some help from the next cohort of Lyons’ students.

“These guys might end up doing some track analysis for that,” said Lyons, gesturing to two younger students in the lab. “That’s great! We might be able to distinguish fights from amplexing.”

“It’s one thing to sit in a classroom and learn about a city and its history,” she said. “But once you’re actually there, seeing it with your own two eyes—like, ‘Oh wow, I saw this picture in my textbook, and now I’m actually here, looking at it!’—it’s a completely different thing.”

Begonja was one of 14 Fordham students who visited Berlin, Germany, on a research trip last spring through a course called Berlin Tales: A Cultural History of Germany’s Kiez and Metropolis. The class, taught by Maria Ebner, Ph.D., a German language professor, involved months of reading and researching texts and narratives on the city, culminating in a weeklong trip to the capital itself.

Carrying on the Memory of a Colleague

“In the German program, we aim to engage more than the language that we’re trying to teach,” said Ebner, who accompanied the students on the trip. “We are trying to offer something that is applicable to now, something that the students are invested in, and give them a little bit more of an understanding of the cultural, historical setting—how history affects the present.”

The Berlin trip was partially financed by an external grant from the Max Kade Foundation, a non-profit organization that supports programs between Germany, Austria, and the United States, and the family of a young man named Christopher Clark—an instructor in the German program who died suddenly last year. His parents made a donation that helped pay for the trip.

“He was very, very fond of and attached to the city of Berlin,” said Ebner, a former colleague of Clark’s.

From Mar. 21 to 28, the students lived in Schöneberg, a lively neighborhood in Berlin. Their first day in Germany, like most days in March, greeted them with arctic temperatures (and jet lag).

Exploring Culture and History

“We were in the snow, freezing cold, and we stopped to get sausages and mulled wine,” recalled Sophia Lee, FCRH ’20. “We were all huddled together in our coats with our really warm drinks and it was just like, ‘Oh my gosh, we’re here!’”

Berlin brought new sights and sounds to the U.S. students: discussions about immigration with a Syrian refugee, a concert in a small instrument repair shop on the suburban side of the city, and even a dark, dirt-filled 10-foot deep execution pit in Sachsenhausen, a Nazi concentration camp an hour away from the capital.

“I walked down this ramp, stood, and looked out and up. It just struck me that this was the last thing that a lot of people saw,” Lee said.

The Research: Migrant Music, Secret Files, and Censorship

One of the biggest reasons behind the Berlin trip was the students’ research.

At the beginning of the semester, they selected topics that stood out to them. One project explored the difference between women’s rights in East and West Berlin; another investigated how German cinema helped reunify the divided Germanies.

“Music is not only an art—it’s a societal tool,” said Begonja, who studied how music allowed Turkish migrants to better assimilate into German society. “It’s very important for people like migrants in Germany because it allows them to fit in better. If they’re able to show their difficulties and their emotions through their music, it allows them to better integrate themselves and unify with one another.”

Begonja’s research turned up many papers that supported her argument—how music is a transcultural phenomenon that can bring two cultures together—and helped her connect the Oriental rap and hip-hop movement in the 1990s to life in the present. “Popular Turkish-German rappers today such as Bushido, Sido, and Kool Savas, are able to continue in their legacy and practice,” she wrote in a seven-page paper that will be published on a digital Fordham platform this semester. But it wasn’t until she reached Berlin that she connected her classroom lessons with reality.

“I was able to get a local feel for the life of a typical migrant in Berlin,” said Begonja.

The student who described the execution pit in Sachsenhausen—Sophia Lee, a film and television major—studied the Stasi files, a group of documents collected by the notorious East German secret service.

“Basically, in East Berlin, six million people had files on them. It was like their neighbors and husbands spying on them. And after the Wall fell, people found out about the files and wanted to read them,” Lee said. “I was really interested in examining people’s personal experiences with reading their own file and what they made of what was said in there. Was it true? Was it not true?”

Lee read academic papers and, with the help of Professor Ebner, translated some of the Stasi files that she had access to. In Germany, they even visited a Stasi prison.

“The files should be seen for what they are, the records of an oppressive state apparatus firmly positioned within the framework of a socialist and totalitarian regime,” she wrote in her paper. “While the information contained within the files is accurate, they fail to capture the reality of a subject’s experience and life.”

Though the students reached back into history for their research, their findings, which will be published by the end of this semester on a digital research platform, aren’t archaic, Ebner emphasized. They still resonate today.

“We’re still talking about immigration, censorship, and the question of what needs to be transparent by the government,” she said. “How music and culture influences political movements or the ideas of a group of people, and how appropriation of culture happens on multiple different levels.”

Their Reunion in America

Lee, Begonja, and Ebner reunited with several members of their study abroad group on Sept. 20 at the Rose Hill campus. Gathered around a table on the fifth floor of Faber Hall, they reminisced about their trip, watched homemade video collages of their time in Berlin, and spoke with students interested in taking the class in the future. The course has been available for three spring semesters—in 2012, 2014, and 2018—and will be offered again in 2020.

As the sun began to set, they Skyped with one of their study abroad mates, Elodie Huston, FCLC ’18, on the classroom’s projector screen. Huston, along with another student who studied abroad in Berlin last spring, is now living in Germany on a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship. It was there, in Berlin last spring, that Huston found out she had won a Fulbright.

They chatted for a few minutes before she had to say goodnight.

“What time is it there, 11 o’clock?” a student guessed.

Huston had already logged off, but their conversation continued.

“Time stops in Berlin,” Begonja said. 

“We are so proud of all of the students who worked with us this year, especially the graduates of 2018,” said John Kezel, Ph.D., director of the Campion Institute, which helps Fordham students apply for prestigious scholarships and fellowships. “We are also delighted that so many alumni decided to come back and work with us to achieve their dreams.”

Kayla Matteucci is the first Fordham student to be selected as a James C. Gaither Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a global think tank with centers around the world. She was one of 12 students chosen out of hundreds of applicants. The yearlong fellowship in Washington, D.C., which will focus on nuclear policy, will allow Matteucci to advance the research interests she developed as an intern at Fordham Law’s Center on National Security.

“I was doing research related to counterterrorism and cybersecurity, and there’s a lot of overlap with nuclear policy,” said the international relations and Spanish major, who is graduating from Fordham College at Lincoln Center. Matteucci is currently interning with two nongovernmental organizations at the United Nations, where she focuses on disarmament. In April, she traveled on a Fordham-funded trip to Geneva for the U.N. Preparatory Committee meeting for the 2020 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, attending as part of a youth delegation.

“It was clear that states are preparing for the eventuality of cooperation on  disarmament,” she said. “With dialogue lacking in most political spaces—even the nuclear field is quite partisan—it is exciting to see people searching for common ground.”

Sean McKay is graduating from Fordham College at Rose Hill, but he will be celebrating in Rio de Janeiro, where he is studying Portuguese on a Boren Scholarship. And McKay has even more reason to celebrate: This year he won a Fulbright, which he expects will have him returning to Brazil to teach English. He’ll also be required to design a community engagement project, and has proposed starting a creative writing workshop where students will offer constructive criticism and share Brazilian and American media for inspiration.

“The idea comes directly from the creative workshop classes taken at Fordham as part of my creative writing minor,” said McKay.

Upon completing the Boren, McKay should be well prepared for his Fulbright teaching position; this past year he has been studying Brazil’s language and literature.

“I had learned Spanish and there was linguistic crossover with Portuguese, but I had never heard of, or engaged with, plays, short stories, and fiction of Brazil,” he said. He has also noticed similarities in Brazilian and American identities, which he would not have been aware of had he not immersed himself in Brazil’s “vibrant and rich culture.”

“In its core, the Fulbright means growing your sense of empathy to build deeper relationships with communities that Americans don’t often directly engage with,” he said.

Olivia Korth graduates today from the Gabelli School of Business with a concentration in entrepreneurship and a double minor in sustainable business and environmental studies. After winning a Newman’s Own Fellowship, she will have the opportunity to combine all of her interests while helping underserved communities. Korth will be getting in on the ground floor of a new nonprofit called Wholesome Wave, a food equity company that seeks to salvage and sell fruits and vegetables that are deemed unattractive by consumers and supermarkets but are perfectly fine nutritionally. Newman’s Own will pay her salary.

“I’ll be working with a team of four for one year. We hope to grow the number of grocery chains that carry the food from five to 15,” she said. “The stores are near farms in the Appalachian region of Virginia, an area that has high rates of poverty, obesity, and diabetes.

She added that she had just been talking about the “ugly food” movement in one of her classes a day before she interviewed for the position, so she felt well versed in the subject.

“I had already worked in the realm of sustainability, all my classes touch on it, so I felt like everything just came together,” she said.

As of May 10, other prestigious awards won this year include:

• In addition to Sean McKay, six Fulbright awards: Shay Chang, FCLC ’18, to South Korea; Margaret Fahey, FCRH ’18, to France; Elodie Huston, FCLC ’18, to Germany; Israel Muñoz, FCLC ’17, to Mexico; Melani Shahin, FCRH ’18, to Germany; and Luca Vettori, FCLC ’18, to Jordan
• One Luce Scholarship: Nikolas Oktaba, FCLC ’15
• One Rangel Graduate Fellowship: Erik Angamarca, FCRH ’14
• One Coro Fellowship: Taina Quiles, FCLC ’18
• One National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates award: Sunand Raghupathi, FCRH ’20
• One New York City Teaching Fellowship: Mayarita Castillo, FCLC ’16
• Three Gates Millennium Scholarships: Amarachi Korie, FCLC ’18; Yota Oue, FCRH ’18; and Anisha Pednekar, GABELLI ’19
• One White House Internship: Victoria Pascullo, FCRH ’19
• Three Boren Fellowships: Michael Johnson, GSAS ’19; Robyn J. Murray, GSAS ’19; and Jessica Way, GSAS ’19

“I knew I had to make changes in my life. It took me 30 years to make those changes.”

Today, Pullen is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate School of Social Service researching how addiction affects her Harlem neighborhood. She is the president of Let’s Talk SAFETY, Inc., a not-for-profit dedicated to substance abuse prevention for teens and youth. And she is the chief operating officer of The PILLARS, a recovery center in the heart of Harlem.

“I cut my teeth in Fordham’s Office of Student Life on the Rose Hill campus,” she said. “I began to develop the model for SAFE in Harlem as an intern there.”

She said that, odd as it may seem, her personal journey from addiction to recovery has helped her to realize her calling—and for that she is thankful.

“In recovery, I found that my purpose was to come back to the community where I was born and raised. I want the youth to see me as an example of what is possible in the community,” she said.

PILLARS promotes holistic approaches to recovery, she said. The program offers “one stop shopping” with 12-step programs, individual recovery planners, peer recovery coach training, workforce development, domestic violence prevention, parenting skills, yoga, reiki, and even acupuncture.

Those coming into PILLARS for services can be assured of their anonymity; but Pullen doesn’t plan to hide her past.

“I stand as an example. That’s why I live my addiction and recovery out loud,” she said.

Pullen will be part of a film screening of “Reversing the Stigma” and a panel discussion on recovery on Monday, Sept. 25 at 5 p.m. at the New York Institute of Technology Auditorium, one block from Fordham Lincoln Center. The event is free and open to the public. Two continuing education hours are available for licensed social workers through GSS. 

Three Fordham students are hoping to revolutionize and reshape those two facets of mental health treatment.

“We have all these different fitness apps out there, so we figured, why not create a similar model for mental health patients?” said Mariella Sypa, a sophomore at Fordham College at Lincoln Center.

The founders of KindMind Mental Wellness Mobile Technology see their start-up program as a mental “fitness” app.

Teaming up for innovation

The KindMind team includes five founders—two of them Fordham students and one a recent graduate, Weiyu Shen, GSAS ’16. Sypa manages operations and business strategy along with her brother, Steven Sypa, who handles legal matters.

The team also includes Elijah Bullard, who will graduate from Fordham this year with a master’s in computer science, and Elle Bernfeld, a licensed therapist who heads KindMind’s creative development. Undergraduate student Francesca Zambrano helps with front-end development.

The app is the brainchild of Mariella Sypa and Bullard, who came up with the idea in February of 2016 after having met at Fordham while studying computer science.

Shen, who graduated with a master’s in computer science, joined the duo as the chief technology officer in April of last year.

The KindMind app team won a pitch competition this past February at TrepCon, sponsored by the   Entrepreneurship Society at Fordham, Adobe, and Deloitte.

With features like mood tracking, a mood diary, and easy access to mental health providers, KindMind aims to benefit both first-time users and people already in treatment. Among the newest features the team has added are voice and face recognition functions that can help detect a person’s mood.

“We wanted to focus on mood tracking to help people become more aware of emotional patterns—and of their importance,” said Sypa.

The mood-tracking feature asks users to describe their moods, how they are feeling, and who may have affected their mood on a given day. The KindMind team hopes to optimize this function even further, with features like emojis and progress achievements.

“All of the features of KindMind work together as one unit,” said Shen, adding that he hopes their users can utilize the app to improve their mental health on a daily basis.

24-hour community support

Another essential tool that users will have is the ability to connect with a licensed mental health professional directly from their phones.

“Help is right in your pocket,” said Sypa. “You don’t even have to worry about getting to a physical location.”

Much like existing popular fitness apps, KindMind will offer a 24/7 community support forum as well as a mental health blog with contributions from professionals.

“We want to have a widespread and honest dialogue about mental health, one in which there is no judgment for anyone,” said Sypa.

Sypa said that KindMind will be a useful resource for mental health professionals just starting out.

“Mental health providers can work from home, set their own work schedules, and hopefully optimize the number of clients they can treat,” she said.

KindMind has been in the beta testing stage and Sypa said the testing will continue during Mental Health Awareness Month. Interested parties can log on to the site (iOS only) to try it. Sypa said the team expects to have an official launch this summer.

—Angie Chen, FCLC ’11

However, 2016 saw many scholarship plans disrupted when instability in Turkey forced the U.S. Department of State to halt all sponsored trips to the area. The Fulbright Scholar Program, Boren Awards, and other programs were cancelled or displaced, leaving students nationwide without a plan of action.

Among that group were three Fordham students who were left in an unfortunate and sensitive situation.

Same Plan, Different Country

Antonio DelGrande, FCRH ’16, was excited about the opportunity to return to Turkey to study the Turkish language on a Critical Language Scholarship (CLS). He began teaching himself Turkish in high school and studied abroad there twice through Fordham. The week that DelGrande was supposed to sign his acceptance letter, however, was the same weekend of the attempted coup (July 15).

“I was upset because I really wanted to go back,” said DelGrande. The thought of not being in Turkey to study Turkish, he said. didn’t feel right.

Instead of Bursa, Turkey, CSL moved DelGrande’s program to Baku, Azerbaijan, a city almost 1,500 miles away. Even though it was an unknown terrain, DelGrande was still enthusiastic about the experience.

“I was [still] part of a great scholarship project and that was going to be a once in a lifetime experience,” said DelGrande. “There was a thrill to exploring a new country I may have [otherwise]never travelled to.”

DelGrande hopes to return to Turkey once it is deemed safe—whether it is for a graduate program, a teaching position, or simply a visit. In the meantime, he continues to improve on his language skills.

“I’ll relish any chance I have to go back,” he said.

Going Despite the Odds

Even before he applied for a Fulbright, David Rowley, FCRH ’13, knew what that he wanted to teach English as a Second Language (ESL) to Arabic speakers. He became interested in the Middle East during his studies at Fordham and traveled to Jordan to study Arabic. After his graduation, he also spent time teaching ESL in Tunisia. Turkey was next on his list, he said, because of the nation’s influence in the Middle East.

“Turkey has a wide effect on the Middle East and Northern Africa economically, culturally, and linguistically,” said Rowley. “I wanted to experience the culture firsthand and learn the extent of its influence.”

When he heard that the state department cancelled his trip, he reached out to everyone he knew in the Middle East. A professor at the university where he was supposed to teach contacted him, saying the university had openings in the foreign language department. Rowley got the teaching job.

“I knew I didn’t want the cancellation to slow me down,” he said. “I was so relieved when he contacted me. I was lucky.”

Rowley now lives in Sakarya, Turkey and works at Sakarya University, where he hopes to spend at least a year before returning to the United States to get a master’s degree in education. He looks forward to teaching English and Arabic stateside, and to entering academia.

Hoping for a Second Chance

Mostafa Elmadboly, FCRH ’16, was forced to accept that his plans to teach English at Bülent Ecevit University in Zonguldak, a Turkish mining town on the Black Sea, were no longer an option for him after the announcement of the state department cancellations.

“I’d gone to Turkey before on the Critical Language Scholarship and had an incredible experience,” said Elmadboly. “A few of my classmates were former Fulbrighters and had encouraged me to apply.”

“There’s history everywhere in Turkey. I [still] want to complement my experiences in the Arab world by studying and living there,” he said.

Rebecca Stark-Gendrano, assistant director in the Office of Prestigious Fellowships, said that because fellowships are intensely competitive to begin with, the office encourages students to develop numerous contingency plans.”That way, if plan A doesn’t work out, we can get right to work helping students figure out how to make plan B or plan C a reality,” she said. (top photo by Osman Orsal)

–Mary Awad

Fordham University students gathered in the Schiff Family Great Hall to take part in the 4^th Annual Bronx Science Consortium Poster Symposium. The event was a presentation of student research on the high school, undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral levels.

“What is really so great about this symposium is the diversity of the projects,” said Ron Jacobson, Ph.D., associate vice president in the Office of the Provost and one of the event’s organizers. “It shows all the interests of our students and the many things the consortium has to offer.”

J. Alan Clark, Ph.D., associate professor of biology and an avian expert, shared his doctoral study on penguin vocalizations. He documented the calls of feeding and mating Spheniscus penguins and tested the penguins’ responses to the calls.

He also gave the students important advice:

“Look for something that interests you, and when you see something weird, question it. There’s a wonderful world to explore, so always keep exploring,” he said, adding in jest they should “become rich and famous” as well.

Project TRUE Students Chasing Opportunity

One of the groups of high school students from Fordham’s Project TRUE (Teens Researching Urban Ecology) presented a project on what kind of small mammals live within the Zoo’s enclosure.

The project is the result of a $2.6 million grant Fordham received with the Wildlife Conservation Society in order to teach and train local high school students in ecology and other STEM subjects.

The study discovered seven species of mammals that roam free within the zoo, the most prominent being white-footed mice.

“Everyone was so welcoming. I come from a small school where there’s not a lot of interest in stuff like this,” said Stephanie Blackwood of North Salem High School. “It’s great that I got to meet kids my age who are interested in the same subjects.”

“It was much better than sitting at a desk all summer,” added Anye Frimpong, of the Bronx Academy of Software Engineering. “I got to try something new. It makes me want to pursue a liberal arts education.”

HPV Research and the Benefits of Catnip

Fordham undergraduate and graduate students were also in attendance.

Fordham senior Victoria Sieverson’s project addressed the positive benefits of catnip for humans. In her study, she tested the effectiveness of pantolactone, an active ingredient in catnip, as a repellent against black-legged ticks.

“The catnip was effective in repelling the ticks away from human skin for about two hours. When I eventually come back to this project, I want to increase the concentration levels to see if I can get it to last longer,” said Sieverson.

(The ingredient, she said, has no negative side effects on cats.)

Jacqueline Heffner, a Rose Hill junior majoring in physics, discovered a way to detect the presence of the HPV virus without long, drawn out tests.

By creating a microsphere, she was able to decipher whether the virus was present based on shifts in the air’s frequency near the sphere’s edge. By testing for HPV infections this way instead of using biosensors, Heffner believes that diagnosis and treatment can begin more quickly.

“In developing countries, instead of wasting time taking tests and sending them miles away to a facility to get results, doctors can take samples and test the frequency right where they are,” said Heffner. “It speeds up the process and allows those who need help to get it faster.”

In all, some two dozen posters were presented. The projects were created in conjunction with the Bronx Science Consortium, an educational partnership of five Bronx institutions that focuses on bringing together science research and intellectual support from its partners.

–Mary Awad