2020 Summer Research Grant Awardees

Dr. Gerald Beyer

Department of Theology
and Religious Studies
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Project Title: Karol Wojtyla’s Katolicka Etyka Spoleczna as Precursor and Hermeneutic Key to Pope John Paul II’s Economic Teaching

In November 2018, The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin Press published the long-awaited text, 
Katolicka etyka społeczna [Catholic Social Ethics] by Karol Wojtyła. Wojtyła, who later became Pope John Paul II, produced this manuscript for his university lectures on Catholic social ethics in the 1950s. I will undertake close textual analysis of Katolicka etyka społeczna and produce a scholarly article about it. The publication of Katolicka etyka społeczna has been lauded as a major achievement in Poland. Unfortunately, it is currently only available in Polish. Nonetheless, it has garnered some attention in the English speaking-world, including discussions in The Tablet of London and First Things in the United States about the meaning and significance of the text for understanding the teaching of Pope John Paul II on economic issues. However, no one has yet written a scholarly article in English that goes beyond brief journalistic treatment. As one of the co-editors of the critical edition of Katolicka etyka społeczna, I am uniquely positioned to produce the first systematic treatment of this text in English. In my article, I will argue that Wojtyła’s manuscript is both consonant with the later papal teaching of John Paul II on economic justice and that Katolicka etyka społeczna provides a hermeneutic key to understanding it. Pope John Paul II’s teaching on economic issues has long been the subject of debate and starkly divergent interpretations. Katolicka etyka społeczna adds more than 500 pages of material that sheds new light on this debate.

Dr. Christa Bialka

Department of Education and Counseling  
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

and

Dr. Irene Kan

Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Project Title: Understanding K-12 Teachers’ Attitudes and Practices when Discussing Disabilities: A Mixed Methods Approach

As of 2017-2018, 95% of 6- to 21-year-old students with disabilities (SWDs) were served in United States public schools alongside peers without disabilities (SWoDs) (U.S. Department of Education, 2019). Although increased access to the general educational curriculum by SWDs advances inclusive education, it poses many unique challenges. For example, according to a recent estimate, 21.6% of SWDs experienced bullying, compared to 14.5% of SWoDs (Rose, Simpson, & Moss, 2015), and SWDs also tend to form fewer friendships and face greater social rejection than SWoDs (Lindsay & McPhereson, 2012). Indeed, individuals with disabilities are members of a marginalized cultural group that has routinely experienced institutionalized discrimination (Darrow, 2013).  Given that the educational experiences of SWDs are shaped by the attitudes of teachers and SWoDs (Costello & Boyle, 2013), it seems that the classroom is a promising place to start the fight against such biases and discriminations. In fact, when classroom discussions about diversity are intentionally designed to promote critical thinking, teachers can directly address prejudice (Miller Dyce & Owusu-Ansah, 2016).  However, according to limited, existing research (Dunst & Bruder, 2013), K-12 teachers rarely discuss disabilities with their students. To understand this, we ask: What are teachers’ attitudes, perceptions and practices related to discussing disability in their K-12 classrooms? We will conduct a mixed-methods study that examines (a) teacher attitudes and perceptions regarding disability-based discussion in K-12 classrooms; (b) the barriers that teachers encounter when discussing disabilities and (c) the practices and related facilitators that allow teachers to discuss disabilities.

Dr. Rebecca Brand

Department of Psychological
and Brain Sciences
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Project Title: The melodies of speech: Mothers’ acoustic packaging during toy play in English- and Spanish-speaking homes

Parents use a special kind of synchrony between their speech and action when talking to babies. This synchrony is called acoustic packaging, and it provides information to help babies punctuate or divide up the action stream (Brand & Tapscott, 2007; Meyer, Hard, Brand, McGarvey, & Baldwin, 2011). The goal of this study is to better understand acoustic packaging.

Meyer et al. (2011) found that during lab-based object demonstrations to their infants, mothers’ utterances fell in to four main types: attention-getting, goal setting, action description and celebration/completion, and among these, action descriptions were the most tightly linked to mothers’ movements. Acoustic packaging therefore seems well-suited to assisting babies in learning about mothers’ actions. This would be particularly true if these utterances in action-demonstration contexts had recognizable “messages” based on prosody, as has been found in the emotional realm (Fernald, 1989). Meyer et al. (2011) found that adults were able to differentiate and correctly identify mothers’ lab-based utterances based on prosody alone. Steck and Brand (unpublished) replicated that effect with a larger sample of raters and more utterance tokens.

For acoustic packaging to play the hypothesized role in infants’ learning, it would have to appear in natural home environments (not just constrained in-lab demonstrations), and it would likely function similarly in languages other than English. In the current study, we attempt to replicate and extend previous work using home-based interactions in both English- and Spanish-speaking samples. We ask whether adults can identify these action-related utterance types based on prosody alone.

Dr. Cheryl Carleton

Department of Economics
Villanova School of Business

Project Title: The Growing Labor Supply of Older Workers:  Implications for Well Being

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), states that the labor force participation rate is expected to rise the fastest for the oldest segments of the population, which they classify as those ages 65 and older, through the year 2024. Studies of alternative work arrangements have seen a growing number of older workers entering into such work arrangements, which include independent contractors, work for contractors who provide services for others and work for just in time employers. If increasing numbers of older workers are remaining in or entering the labor force, and if the numbers engaging in nonstandard work arrangements is indeed rising and continues to rise, it can have significant implications for them and their families’ well being given the nature of how benefits  are provided in the U.S. economy. Using a current and broad sample of older U.S. workers, this study will examine job satisfaction for various alternative work arrangements, across different occupations and separately for men and women. Investigating job satisfaction for older workers, can provide some indication as to whether one can expect the numbers of older workers in various work arrangements to continue to increase. If it does, it may be necessary for the government to rethink how some benefits are both provided and paid for. Moreover, it may suggest that our nation’s labor laws need to be modified such that labor rights and protections are extended to all workers, regardless of employment status.

Dr. Gordon Coonfield

Department of Communication
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Project Title: Kensington Remembers: Vernacular Memorials and Place-Making in Philadelphia

ollective memory is an important area of interdisciplinary scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. It is concerned with the ways groups collectively create, contest, transmit and transform their shared sense of the past in present contexts. While much of this scholarship has focused on “official” forms of memory, little research has examined the ways in which ordinary people—who are often marginalized from the elite institutions charged with maintaining collective memory—engage in the work of remembering. "Kensington Remembers" focuses on the documentation and ethnographic study of vernacular memorials in the Kensington section of Philadelphia. These public expressions of private emotions take a variety of forms—murals, graffiti, improvised shrines and other material objects—all of which appropriate visible, public space to memorialize the traumas and tragedies which the neighborhood has experienced. Funding from the University Summer Research Grant supports the completion of field work and the development of a digital scholarly project that documents, preserves and shares this research with the community and the larger public.

Dr. Alice Dailey

Department of English
College Liberal Arts and Sciences

Project Title: How to Do Things with Dead People: Temporal Conjecture and the Shakespearean History Play

The discipline of literary studies has been dominated for the past several decades by historicist criticism, a critical method that contextualizes literary artifacts in relation to the historical periods in which they were produced. Taking Shakespeare’s English history plays as its primary object of study, How to Do Things with Dead People takes a radical turn away from historicist criticism and its attendant assumptions about literary periodization and context. Seeking to introduce alternative critical methods, the book expands the history plays’ context beyond the immediate conditions of the 15th and 16th centuries to consider them within the ongoing human enterprise of representing and relating to the dead. I describe Shakespeare’s historical drama as, fundamentally, a reproductive technology by which living replicas of dead historical figures are animated and re-killed on stage. Considering the plays in such terms exposes their affinity with a transhistorical array of technologies for producing, reproducing and looking at dead things—technologies like literary doppelgängers, funeral effigies, photography, ventriloquist puppetry, x-ray imagery, capital punishment machines and cloning. By situating the plays in this broader, interdisciplinary context—one that includes current as well as developing technologies—How to Do Things with Dead People breaks down conventional period boundaries that mark off Shakespeare’s reproductive arts as substantively different from our own. The project thereby takes up questions beyond the conventionally defined field of Shakespeare criticism to model new directions for the broader discipline of literary studies.

Dr. Denise Downey

Department of Accounting & Information Systems
Villanova School of Business

Project Title: Multinational company audit quality: The influence of foreign auditor characteristics and incentives

U.S. multinational company audits are typically led by a U.S. accounting firm who relies on the work of other auditors located in jurisdictions where the company maintains significant operations to complete the financial statement audit. Emerging literature suggests that while such reliance often cannot be avoided, audits involving other auditors (referred to “component auditors”) are of lower quality. This is problematic, because evidence suggests that past regulatory interventions are ineffective and investor confidence in the accuracy of financial information provided by management is critical to our global markets. This study explores how characteristics and incentives of component auditors and their regulatory environment impact audit quality and audit quality determinants. Utilizing proprietary data the authors seek to provide descriptive evidence of the nature of work performed by component auditors, their incentives, environment, and expertise, as well as a barriers related to performing a high quality audit. Subsequently, the study aims to provide the first evidence of how these factors relate to audit quality and audit quality determinants at the component audit level as well as the ultimate impact to the overall quality of multinational company audits.

Dr. Scott Dressler

Department of Economics
Villanova School of Business

Project Title: Economic Volatility Under the Ample Reserves Regime

The policy response to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis has resulted in an Ample Reserves Regime. Within this regime, the commercial banking sector holds an unprecedented amount of excess reserves, and the Federal Reserve utilizes a new monetary policy tool by being able to pay interest on these reserve balances. The full implications of this policy tool have yet to be fully understood. The goal of this project is to determine if this policy tool can lead to instability of the commercial banking sector and give rise to non-fundamental economic volatility, two outcomes that run counter to the goals of monetary policy stabilization. The project will determine the necessary conditions for this policy tool to deliver financial instability, the quantitative implications of this financial instability on the overall economy and the policy actions required to restore financial stability. These results will contribute to the current debate on the continued use of this new policy tool as well as continuation of the ample reserves regime.

Dr. Joseph Drury

Department of English  
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Project Title: What Do Machines Want? Adam Smith's Happy Contrivances

My research aims to establish Adam Smith as an important philosopher of technology from whom modern science and technology studies (STS) scholars might have much to learn. Most of the existing scholarship on Adam Smith’s thinking about machines is the work of economic historians, who typically focus on The Wealth of Nations and his ideas about the contribution technological innovation makes to economic growth. Smith in their view understands machines to be little more than efficient, time-saving devices whose development is determined by economic imperatives. By casting a wider net across Smith’s works, however, and by reading him in dialogue with modern philosophy of technology, I will show that Smith actually believes that machines evolve according to an internal principle of “perfection” that operates quite independently of the purposes and intentions of their human users. In fact, in many cases, he notes, our desire for more perfect machines costs us money and produces no net benefit in terms of either time saved or goals accomplished. While this perspective allowed him to provide a uniquely insightful explanation of the pleasure we take in the improvement of our devices, it also explains why those devices can sometimes appear to take on a sinister agency of their own. Writing at the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Smith was one of the first observers to recognize that, left unchecked, the principle driving technological development could even prove hostile to fundamental human needs and interests.

Dr. Gang Feng

Department of Mechanical Engineering
College of Engineering

Project Title: Enhancing the Efficiency of Thermal Energy Storage Materials via Highly-Aligned Three-Dimensional (3D) Nanomaterials Network

Thermal energy storage materials (TESMs) enable the management of thermal energy (heat) in various engineering applications. One type of TESMs is phase change materials (PCMs), for which heat is stored during melting and released during freezing. Paraffin wax (PW) is a promising PCM. However, PW is a poor heat conductor, largely hindering the applications. One strategy of enhancing the charging efficiency is embedding heat-conductive fillers. In order to prevent the filler settlement, the filler content must be sufficiently high so that the PCM shape keeps the same at its melting and freezing states, which is referred as shape stabilization. For achieving the shape stabilization at the minimal filler content, we propose to investigate the dominant factor(s) for enhancing the thermal conduction in highly-conductive-aerogel-based PCMs, which is essential for designing shape-stabilized thermal energy storage materials with ultrahigh performance (capacity and efficiency).

Dr. Brett Grainger

Department of Theology and Religious Studies
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Project Title: Fusion Religion

My research project is part of a larger book project called "Fusion Religion," which will be the first to investigate how the emergence of a mass public option for religious combination—“fusion religion”—was shaped by cultural movements whose religious dimensions have been largely overlooked or underappreciated by scholars. My USG-supported research project examines early methods of religious combination or self-conscious syncretism as they developed within Theosophical circles in the final decades of the 19th century. Theosophical syncretism was underwritten by the "perennial philosophy," which taught that all religions share common historical origins and teach the same core truths. By comparing and combining the religious wisdom of East and West, Theosophists such as H. P. Blavatsky sought to return to the “original religion,” the taproot from which all historical traditions are merely the branches. Working with archival materials at the Emily Sellon Memorial Library at the New York Theosophical Society, as well as the archives of the Theosophical Society in America, based in Wheaton, Ill. I will examine how first and second-generation Theosophist leaders understood the perennial philosophy, and how their ideas developed over time.

Dr. Lance Hannon

Department of Sociology and Criminology
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Project Title: The Empirical Asymmetry of Out-of-Place Policing

It is unlawful for police officers to initiate stops of vehicles based on racial stereotypes. However, as long as it is only one component of reasonable suspicion, the courts have traditionally allowed police officers to consider whether a motorist is “out of place” given the empirical reality of persistently high levels of residential segregation in the United States. Underlying such authorization is the recognition that good police work frequently requires officers to be observant of outliers. Moreover, it can be argued that it is simply human nature for a person’s gaze to fixate on the unusual (even if that unusualness only exists due to institutionalized discrimination in housing). But, if it is simply human nature driving the unequal attention given to minorities in majority White places, one would expect to find parity in the degree of disproportionate response to similarly out-of-place White individuals in predominantly Black neighborhoods. Focusing on Philadelphia, a city that has been aptly described as “hyper-segregated,” I plan to assess the evenness of out-of-place policing using publicly available data from the American Community Survey and the Philadelphia Police Department. My analyses will employ a third-generation benchmarking technique known as the veil-of-darkness test to help ensure that any observed racial disparities in stop rates are due to police officer subjective judgments rather than potential differences in traffic violation rates or vehicle characteristics.

Dr. Paul Hanouna

Department of Finance
Villanova School of Business

Project Title: Why do poor countries pay more for their debt?

Why is so little capital flowing to poorer countries given their higher expected growth opportunities? One explanation is that poorer countries also face higher probabilities of default (sovereign risk). Yet, country fundamental and capital market imperfection determinants of sovereign default risk are poorly understood. This study proposes to quantify the effects of institutional quality (such as rule of law, corruption and central bank independence), information asymmetry, costs of international trade, government policies and historical defaults on sovereign Credit Default Swap (CDS) spreads (a market-determined measure of default risk). The study will be conducted as a panel to exploit the cross-sectional and time aspects of the data. The study plans on addressing endogeneity concerns by examining a) a set of instrumental variables that have previously been used to identify institutional quality and b) events during the great financial crisis (2008-2010) that shocked the availability of capital to developing countries. The study contributes directly to one of the major economic development puzzles and is directly applicable to the financial industry and determining bank capital ratios under Basel III.

Dr. Janette Herbers

Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Project Title: Family Homelessness as a Context of Early Child Development

Families with children make up about one third of all the people staying in emergency housing in the United States, and approximately half the children in these families are under the age of six years. When experiencing family homelessness, young children face chronic risks associated with extreme poverty as well as acute risks from the stressful events that precipitate or accompany the loss of housing. This study will plan to build on this prior research examining aspects of shelter environments for family and child wellbeing. We will recruit a sample of families with young children who are currently residing in homeless shelters. We will conduct structured interviews with parents regarding their family’s experiences of psychosocial risk and adversity, perspectives on the shelter environments, and aspects of family and child wellbeing. We will align data collected from individual families with data provided by our community collaborators describing how well programs meet the needs of families with young children, with attention to developmental appropriateness of physical spaces, shelter policies, resources and services, and interactions between residents and staff. The two primary aims of the proposed study are: (1) to examine variation in quality of shelter environments and associations between perspectives of shelter providers and shelter residents, and (2) to assess how aspects of shelter environments are associated with family wellbeing in terms of parent functioning, quality of the parent-child relationship and children’s social-emotional functioning.

Dr. Zuyi (Jacky) Huang

Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering
College of Engineering

Project Title: Development of an in Silico Platform to Discover Inhibitors of Cyclin Dependent Kinases for Combating Cancers

Cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs) are considered as potential targets for anti-cancer medication, as CDK inhibitors can interrupt the cell cycle regulation in cancer cells (e.g., breast cancer) and make those cells die. The equilibrium dissociation constant (KD) is the basic parameter to evaluate the binding property of the drug-receptor. Experimental methods (e.g., radioligand binding assay, SPR, and FRET) are typically used to screen ligands (also named drugs or compounds) to inhibit CDKs. However, it is costly and time-consuming to determine KD for thousands of ligands using these experimental approaches. This explains why only a few CDK inhibitors like seliciclib and flavopiridol were tested in clinical trials. It is thus in an urgent demand to develop affordable and efficient approaches to infer KD to accelerate the discovery of CDK inhibitors for clinical trials.

This study aims to develop an in silico platform that can predict KD for ligands and selected CDKs from a reliable ligand-protein docking program that takes crystal structures of ligands and CDKs as the inputs. Specifically, existing data for KD and crystal structures of ligands and CDKs will be used to develop mathematical models that can predict KD for those ligands with known crystal structures but without measured KD value. If successful, the proposed platform will significantly push the envelope of people’s knowledge on CDK inhibitors. The models can be also used by other bio-modelers to derive the kinetic constants for developing reliable mathematical models for combating human diseases.

Jason Iuliano, JD

Charles Widger School of Law

Project Title: Closing the Access-to-Justice Gap in Student Loan Bankruptcy

This year, a quarter of a million student loan debtors will file for bankruptcy. Of those, only three hundred will discharge their educational debt. Although these statistics represent a substantial access-to-justice gap, few scholars have explored the reason for its existence. And those few who have done so advance an incomplete picture of the system. Specifically, they argue that strict bankruptcy laws are to blame. Although this claim has intuitive appeal (the Bankruptcy Code does, after all, place special requirements on student loans), it conflicts with the empirical reality.

In prior research, I conducted the first nationwide assessment of student loan bankruptcy proceedings and found a more important factor underlying this access-to-justice gap—namely, the fact that bankrupt student loan debtors rarely attempt to prove “undue hardship.” Although meeting the undue hardship standard is not guaranteed, my study showed that those who attempt to do so are likely to obtain a discharge. In addition, the study estimated that tens of thousands of additional bankrupt debtors would have been successful, if only they had taken the correct legal steps.

This project aims to build on my earlier research by finding a way to close this access-to-justice gap. The study involves two parts: (1) conducting interviews to understand why bankrupt individuals fail to pursue student loan discharges and (2) running a field experiment to determine whether legal aid materials can help debtors navigate the discharge process.

Dr. Peleg Kremer

Department of Geography & the Environment
College Liberal Arts and Sciences

and

Dr. Yimin Zhang

Department of Mathematics and Statistics
College Liberal Arts and Sciences

Project Title: Spatio-temporal modeling of the relationship between surface temperature, ambient temperature and urban structure in metropolitan urban systems

The goal of this project is to develop spatio-temporal models revealing the relationship between surface and ambient temperature, and their interaction with urban structure. Such models are only beginning to develop in the literature because of the complexity of modeling and the lack of appropriate empirical data but are critical for a nuanced understanding of the impact of local climate on urban sustainability and human well-being. To achieve this goal, we propose this collaborative project that builds on our individual expertise in statistical modeling (Dr. Zhang) and spatial modeling (Dr. Kremer) and offers new insight in the fields of urban sustainability and spatio-temporal modeling of urban systems.

Dr. Anthony Lagalante

Department of Chemistry
College Liberal Arts and Sciences
 

Project Title: 3D Printed Sorbents for Water Purification

Clean water is essential for life on earth. Proper treatment of water sources to remove both natural and artificial contaminants is necessary to ensure the future sustainability of this vital resource. Activated carbon is currently the most widely used sorbent for point-of-use (POU) water cleanup worldwide.  Chemical modifications, such as carbon nanotubes, graphene and biological modifications, to activated carbon permit tailoring the removal of inorganic, organic and biological contaminants. The primary goal of this proposal is to demonstrate and evaluate commercially available 3D printers to produce chemically modified, carbon-based sorbents for on-demand, point-of-use water purification in emergency situations. The scope of this proposed work will be to 1) design a column-based sorbent to permit pressurized cleanup in a flowing water stream and 2) compare commercially available carbon-modified filaments. The 3D design and printing of sorbents will involve both mechanical engineering and chemical measurements using analytical instrumentation to measure water purity.

Dr. Christiane (Christy) Lang Hearlson

Department of Theology and Religious Studies  
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Project Title: Ecological Conversion in a Buy Nothing Group

My research project is a qualitative interview-based study on self-reported shifts in ecological awareness, habits, and ethical-spiritual vision (what modern Christian theologians refer to as “ecological conversion”) that occur through members’ participation in a local intentional gift economy, a Buy Nothing Group. I plan to interview ten regular participants of a Buy Nothing Group about their views on the group and the impact of such participation on their lives, views and habits, with a focus on its impact on their awareness of social and environmental issues.

Dr. Esther Laury

M. Louise Fitzpatrick College of Nursing

Project Title: End-of-life Communication and Decision Making Among African Americans

Many African Americans with serious illness could benefit from comfort-focused care such as hospice at the end of life, but most choose life-prolonging treatments that have little chance of cure.  Improvements in end-of-life communication among health care providers, patients and families would help decision-making in this population. This study will provide information that will help us to understand how decisions are made in this situation, which in turn will lead to interventions to improve care for African Americans with serious illness and their families.

Dr. Yumi Lee

Department of English
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Project Title: Someone Else's War: The Korean War in the American Racial Imaginary

Someone Else’s War: The Korean War in the American Racial Imaginary argues that the Korean War ushered in a new mode of liberal inclusion that would become the defining technique for managing racial difference in the United States over the next half-century. In this book project, I examine how what I call the racial logic of liberal inclusion develops in the institutions of the military, the prison camp, the university and the nuclear family during the Korean War. The Cold War period coincides with the rise and fall of liberal multiculturalism as a racial formation, and while the importance of Cold War ideological geopolitics to the making of racial liberalism and civil rights has been well established, the role of U.S. militarism in these racial transformations remains undertheorized. Someone Else’s War establishes and elucidates the transnational connection between multiculturalism and militarism—between the racial logic of liberal inclusion and the pattern of endless war—which together have structured American life since midcentury. To explore this connection, I turn to the rich emerging archive of contemporary American novels that are newly revisiting the Korean War and working through its meaning, including novels by Toni Morrison, Ha Jin, Chang-Rae Lee and Rolando Hinojosa. Taken together, I argue, these works and others generate a new narrative of contemporary U.S. war-making that diverges from nationalist imperatives to reveal how state violence undergirds the post-1945 project of liberal multiculturalism.

Dr. Lisa Marco-Bujosa

Department of Education and Counseling
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Project Title: Facilitating First-Generation College Student Persistence in STEM Majors

STEM is the fastest growing sector of the American economy (NSF, 2016), with employment projected to increase by 12.5% from 2012 to 2022 (U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee, 2012). Yet, first generation college students (FGCS), or students whose parents did not complete a four-year college degree (U.S. Department of Education, 2011), are consistently less likely to major in STEM and consistently leave STEM programs at higher rates compared to non-FGCS. Although FGCS have the potential to make significant contributions to the American economy, research regarding their experiences in higher education tells a different story. Numerous studies have underscored the challenges FGCS encounter in college, including insufficient academic preparation (Engle & Tinto, 2008), financial challenges and family obligations (Wilson & Kittleson, 2013), as well as racism, classism and culture shock (Lohfink & Paulsen, 2005). Unfortunately, these challenges may be exacerbated in STEM courses, which are characterized by a competitive and chilly climate that alienates minority students (Fouad & Santana, 2017). Taking into consideration the challenges FGCS encounter, this study was designed to facilitate their persistence in STEM by addressing two questions: 1) What are the experiences, including challenges and strengths, of FGCS persisting in STEM? and 2) How can universities facilitate FGCS persistence in STEM? Using Villanova University as a case study for investigating the persistence of FGCS in a predominantly white university, this research will provide valuable information for universities around the United States in the design of curricular innovations, faculty supports and academic services to enhance FGCS persistence.

Dr. Whitney Martinko

Department of History
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Project Title: The Corporate Origins of Cultural Property in the Early United States

This project reconsiders the standard narrative of how groups of people have defined ownership of objects, art and places of collective significance in the United States. Interdisciplinary scholars of cultural property point to the Lieber Code—enacted in 1863 by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln to regulate the conduct of Union troops—as the origin of international definitions of cultural property. What these scholars have failed to realize, I contend, is how this foundational definition of cultural property grew out of debates over the nature of corporations in the early United States. My research examines how residents of the early United States and North American Indigenous nations, from 1776 to 1863, experimented with using incorporation to create legal entities to hold property whose value could not be easily assessed in monetary worth. I investigate how libraries ascribed financial value to historic collections in corporate charters and insurance policies, how institutional proprietors described the moral value of collections to justify tax exemptions, how corporate institutions managed real estate to fund collection purchases, how jurists adjudged the value of cultural institutions and their property in legal suits and how early Americans defined sacred property as “priceless.” This research engages in a broader scholarly conversation about how residents of post-revolutionary American republics, including Haiti, Mexico, and Gran Colombia, developed workable definitions of public and private property. In turn, it aims to inform decisions about closures, sales, and mergers of cultural institutions today with a better historical understanding of their founding missions.

Dr. Allison Payne

Department of Sociology and Criminology
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Project Title: Risk and Protective Factors for Youth Cyberbullying Perpetration and Victimization

The project will focus on the risk and protective factors associated with cyberbullying perpetration and victimization. For the first part of the project, I will conduct a systematic review of the research on these factors. For the second part, I will use data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Studies Program to original research that will address several limitations of the current research.

Dr. Narda Quigley

Department of Management and Operations
Villanova School of Business

Project Title: On the Use of Professional Sports Teams In Management Research: A Review And Synthesis

Professional sports teams offer a fascinating and relatable glimpse into the multilevel issues that occur within organizations. Research questions reflecting the major management research branches of strategy, organizational behavior and human resource management have been examined using data from all major professional sports leagues in the U.S., including Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League, Major League Soccer and the National Football League. For this summer research award opportunity, I propose a review and synthesis of the last 20 years of research that has included professional sports team samples published in major management, human resource management and organizational behavior journals. Like Barnes et al. (2018) and Porter, Outlaw, Gale, and Cho (2019), in the proposed project, I intend to focus on a particular research methodology, review the extant literature, extract relevant themes, revisit the limitations associated with this work more carefully and conjecture what the future may hold for this research. In a general sense, with this review, I hope to spur thoughtful and creative future research that more deeply considers issues of generalizability and works toward theory-building, in addition to testing. With respect to my personal research agenda, I am looking to develop a new research stream using publicly available archival data on MLB teams, and completing this comprehensive review will help me personally understand where my future work may have the most impact.

Dr. Benjamin Sachs

Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Project Title: Evaluating the potential of bupropion and topiramate to reduce binge eating in fluoxetine-insensitive mice

This research project aims to evaluate the impact of brain serotonin deficiency on the ability of two drugs to reduce binge eating. Unpublished work from the lab has shown that low levels of brain serotonin prevent the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), fluoxetine (Prozac) from reducing binge-like food consumption, but whether other drugs with different mechanisms of action would remain effective in the context of serotonin deficiency is not known. Bupropion (Wellbutrin) is frequently used as an alternative to SSRIs in the treatment of depression, and its mechanism of action is not thought to require serotonin, but whether this drug would reduce binge eating has not been established. Topiramate is a drug that is used clinically to treat binge eating and related disorders, and although its mechanism of action is not well defined, it is also not thought to depend heavily on the serotonergic system. We hypothesize that these alternative treatments will be effective in serotonin-deficient mice that fail to respond to fluoxetine. The results from the proposed research have the potential to inform the reasons for treatment failure in the context of binge eating disorder pharmacotherapy and could be useful in providing rationale for selecting certain treatments over others for patients who may have neurochemical disturbances, such as low brain serotonin.

Dr. Kabindra Shakya

Department of Geography and the Environment
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Project Title: Children’s indoor air exposure to air pollutants at Philadelphia homes

Exposure to particulate matter is associated with several adverse health effects. We spend most of time indoors, thus most of exposure also occurs in an indoor environment. However, majority of studies are focused on outdoor environments. Children in Philadelphia are reported to have high asthma prevalence but there are few studies about indoor air quality in Philadelphia. In this study, air pollutants (mainly particulate matter and nitrogen oxides) will be monitored from children’s homes in Philadelphia. Particulate matter will be measured by using a nephelometer and nitrogen oxides will be measured by using a passive sampler. An indoor air quality meter will measure carbon dioxide, temperature and relative humidity. Children will be recruited from two schools in Philadelphia. Besides the assessment of indoor air quality in Philadelphia, the study will also be helpful in educating Philadelphia communities about indoor air pollution.

Dr. Rachel Skrlac Lo

Department of Education and Counseling
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Project Title: Closing the Reading Gap: Valuing Children’s Out-of-School Literacy Practices

In this study on third and fourth graders in after-school clubs, I examine children’s out-of-school reading and writing practices to better understand discrepancies between formal literacy instruction and children’s “real world” literacy practices. This study is grounded in the ideological model of literacy, which considers being literate as more than acquiring discrete technical skills such as an ability to decode letters and words. Using this model, I consider the ways that texts, sociocultural factors and power dynamics affect how different literacy practices are valued in our society. By studying the children’s literacy practices in these after-school clubs, I gain insight into their practices as well as their perspectives and beliefs. I observe how they use and create texts in routine interactions and identify patterns that indicate which practices are valued by this group of children. Findings indicate that children are using reading and writing to engage in cultural production (e.g., making comics) and also to understand complex social ideas and to engage in identity work. Knowing how children read and compose in this context has the potential to identify causes of variations in student achievement in English Language Arts and may improve teaching and learning in the communities where the study occurred. It also provides insight into literacy practices across broader social contexts, which will improve the quality and relevancy of literacy instruction, including resolving shortcomings in literacy education that can prevent highly intelligent children from succeeding in outmoded classrooms.

Dr. Cristina Soriano

Department of History
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Project Title: Imperial Ruptures Colonial Experiments in Trinidad During the Age of Revolutions

Imperial Ruptures explores Trinidad’s transition from the Spanish to the British rule and argues that the trans-imperial character of the Caribbean island created a unique political and social space for colonial experimentation, one that allowed the British to test and appraise different imperial practices that would be later implemented on other domains. Imperial Ruptures reconstructs the history of the multiple “experiments” that the Spanish and British empires performed on late eighteenth-century Trinidad and how these created a crisis of governability and social conflicts. This project also explores the ways in which residents of Trinidad sought to discipline the island by implementing original and borrowed technologies of governance in the form of new laws, commercial regulations and social rules. Imperial Ruptures makes significant scholarly contributions: it contributes to the formation of the History of the Trans-imperial Atlantic by analyzing how both empires used Trinidad as a laboratory to implement different laws and regulations, how colonial agents learned from previous experiences and how members of the multicultural and multiracial society of Trinidad perceived, experienced and intervened these processes. Second, this project contributes with important scholarly discussions on the history of modern European empires and its local imbrications, seeking to reconstruct and analyze the ways in which empire-building materialized throughout unique local interactions in a trans-imperial space. Finally, this project provides a historical perspective that engages with interdisciplinary debates on the plural and heterogeneous character of the modern Caribbean, a region that challenges simplistic “west/non-west” and demands new epistemological frameworks.

Dr. Alyssa Stark

Department of Biology
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Project Title: A leap of faith: the role of adhesion on tropical ant running and jumping

In a single foraging bout, forest-dwelling worker ants may traverse complex leaf litter on the ground, rough bark on trees, and smooth leaves. Foraging above ground is particularly dangerous, as vertical ascents and descents require strong, repeatable attachment to avoid falling, which can lead to death for this wingless insect. Although there are several studies that have measured ant locomotor performance and adhesion, two key parameters for worker ant foraging success, very few combine these measures to understand how adhesive performance impacts locomotor performance. The primary goal of this study is to test if and how adhesive performance influences locomotor performance and behavior of arboreal and ground-dwelling ant species in the tropical forest. The results of this work will improve our understanding of ant adhesion and locomotion, and their potential tradeoffs, and characterize a nearly undocumented locomotor strategy of ants (jumping), which changes the way we think about animal navigation in complex environments.

Dr. Amber Stuver

Department of Physics
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Project Title: LIGO Data Quality Investigations for Specialized Burst Gravitational Wave Searches

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) observes the Universe through gravitational waves. These waves of changing gravitational field result from the acceleration of mass and alternatingly compress and stretch space in opposing orthogonal directions. Only astronomical (>1 solar masses) amounts of mass undergoing extremely large accelerations will produce gravitational waves with detectable strength at Earth. All confirmed detections to date have been from merging binary systems that have precise signal predictions which allow for targeted search methods. The next class of gravitational wave that is expected to be detected are bursts which originate from sources that are unanticipated or whose internal physics is not understood well enough for precision signal predictions. This research targets a subclass of burst gravitational waves from cosmic strings that, if detected, could produce the observational evidence for string theory. Specifically, this work will focus on data quality investigations that will reduce the impact of noise on the burst cosmic string search resulting in an increase in the confidence of any candidate detections.

Dr. Le Wang

Department of Mathematics and Statistics
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Project Title: Novel efficient two-phase sampling designs

In biomedical cohort studies for assessing the association between an outcome variable and a set of covariates, it is common that some covariates can only be measured on a subgroup of participants. For example, in a breast cancer study that involves 800 participants, the researcher is able to collect demographic covariates such as age and race for all participants, but she can only afford to measure an expensive new biomarker for 200 participants. An important design question is which 200 participants to select into the subgroup in order to achieve greater statistical efficiency for estimating the association between the risk of breast cancer and the biomarker. The incomplete data structure in this breast cancer study can be described by a two-phase sampling scheme, where the outcome (i.e., having breast cancer or not) and the completely observed covariates (i.e., age and race) are collected on all participants at phase I and the new biomarker is collected on a subset at phase II. For binary outcomes, existing two-phase sampling designs focus on improving statistical efficiency for estimating association parameters between the outcome and phase I variables. My research interest is to develop sampling methods that define and oversample “informative” subjects from the full cohort to increase statistical efficiency with respect to phase II covariates. It is of great importance in studies where the covariates of interest cannot be completely collected. My goal this summer is to extend our previous work that focused on binary outcome variables to scenarios with continuous outcomes.

Dr. Zeynep Yom

Department of Economics
Villanova School of Business

Project Title: Government Bailouts During Financial Crises:  Banks, Sovereign Risk and Optimal Interventions

The European debt catastrophe that followed the 2008-2009 global financial crisis exposed two critical questions about the diabolic loop of bank failure and sovereign risk. First, should a government intervene and rescue the banking sector that faces liquidity problems at the cost of transferring the risk to the government’s balance sheets? Second, how much default risk can banks tolerate by lending to the government before it puts banks into trouble? These interrelated problems have not been studied systematically, even though they stand at the frontiers of macroeconomic theory in reflecting a universal phenomenon–the two-way transmission of risk between banks and government. My proposed research addresses these questions by studying the interaction between the government and the financial sector, and the transmission of the risks between these sectors. Collaborating with two colleagues, Sewon Hur (Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland) and Cesar Sosa-Padilla (University of Notre Dame), I create a new theory of bank activity and sovereign risk that finds the optimal structure of government interventions during financial crises. Our hypothesis is sovereign defaults are more likely if the banking sector is in trouble and the government chooses to bailout the banks. Our research, which will generate a groundbreaking article for publication at a top-tier peer-reviewed economics journal, fills a major gap in current economic thinking. It also carries practical implications, because future policymakers will continue to confront the twin problems of insolvent banks and sovereign risk–and whether they should bail out failing banks as a solution.

Dr. Joseph Robert Yost

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
College of Engineering

Project Title: Development of an All-Glass Modular Building System for use in Civil Infrastructure

As a building material, glass is strong in compression, very weak in tension and susceptible to brittle fracture. Consequentially, glass has historically been considered nonstructural, with no contribution to structural system strength and stiffness. In recent years, however, glass is being used increasingly by engineers and architects as a structural material. This is a consequence of advances in glass manufacturing technology, and improved methods of structural design and connection detailing that simultaneously exploit the material’s high compression strength and effectively compensating for its weakness in tension and tendency for brittle fracture. This research looks to further advance the use of glass as a structural material through the construction of all-glass, compression-only shell-type structures that are constructed using modular assembly of individual three-dimensional hollow glass units. Central to effective system function of glass in this application is effective force transfer between neighboring hollow glass units with no interface cracking associated with local stress concentrations. The research supported in this proposal works towards solving this connection challenge.