FACULTY FELLOWS

Agnese Codebò, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish, will use her Fellowship award to further her investigation of the social relations and cultural practices around “garbage” in Argentina and Brazil and explore the question of how garbage matters culturally and socially in these countries. Her work challenges the dominant narratives that portray waste as undesirable and useless and instead looks to culture, activism and urban space to show how these cultures coexist with waste despite our environmental crises.

Steven Goldsmith, PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment, teaches multiple courses through an environmental sustainability lens, including Introduction to Environmental Science, Watershed Biogeochemistry and Our Warming Planet.

Dr. Goldsmith’s collaborative and transdisciplinary research program focuses on reducing human exposure to environmental contamination with a particular emphasis on water quality. Recent projects have linked land development practices and road salt application rates to impacts on our regional water supply, including elevated sodium concentrations in Philadelphia tap water during winter months. He is also participating in community-inclusive collaborative research projects seeking to reduce lead exposure in a LatinX community in Norristown, Pa., as well as lessen plastic pollution in coastal southwest Puerto Rico.

Time and resources allotted by the VICJS Fellows Program allowed Dr. Goldsmith to complete an on-going transition to a collaboration driven, solutions-oriented research and teaching program which seeks to improve environmental sustainability of the greater Philadelphia area. He will further develop a capacity building research project centered on understanding the behavioral drivers of road salt application both at the municipal and household level with assistance of a cross-disciplinary team of Villanova faculty and community partners. Additionally, he will work to expand a collaborative, community-inclusive lead exposure education program to other disadvantaged communities in the greater Philadelphia region. Finally, Dr. Goldsmith will take lessons learned from collaborations and apply them to Villanova curriculum in both existing and new team-taught courses with a service-learning component. 

Daniel Jackson Smith, PhD, AGPCNP-BC, CNE, is the Weingarten Endowed Assistant Professor, M. Louise Fitzpatrick College of Nursing. Dr. Smith teaches across the curriculum in courses such as Imperatives for Global and Public Health Nursing and Planetary Health for Global Populations.

Dr. Smith’s research utilizes participatory action research and data science methodologies to better understand the health impacts of various environmental exposures. He is currently completing studies related to heat-related illness first aid in migrant farmworkers and understanding local patterns of lead exposure in the Latinx community of Norristown, Pa. Dr. Smith is also a nurse practitioner at LCH Health and Community Services in Kennett Square, Pa., where he provides primary care services to mushroom farmworkers and serves as the co-chair for the global nurses’ climate change committee with the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments.

During his tenure as a faculty fellow in the VICJS, Dr. Smith solidfied community partnerships to support environmental health research in Norristown, and conducted a preliminary analysis of the impact of neighborhood heat signatures as an effect modifier of hospital admissions due to renal dysfunction in urban communities within Philadelphia and Atlanta. He will also work on increasing climate, justice,and sustainability content in courses within the interdisciplinary Global Health Minor and broader nursing curriculum.