November 04, 2022

We are pleased to recognize the recent grants, publications, presentations, awards and honors of the members of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Awards & Honors

Psychology doctoral student Liz Espinal was awarded the International Neuropsychological Society Memory and Memory Disorders Research Award for the INS Annual meeting.  

Associate Teaching Professor of Chemistry Monica Ilies, PhD, won the Division of Chemical Education Travel Award for the Spring 2023 American Chemical Society ACS National Meeting for her talk "The Dos and Don'ts of Teaching Chemistry to College students: an Intercontinental Experience." 

Biology graduate students Beth Kern and Kathryn Markey both won awards for their poster presentations at Drexel's College of Medicine Discovery Day Research Symposium. Markey, a second year PhD student in the Garcia Lab, was awarded First Place for Outstanding Junior Graduate Student Poster. Kern, a third year PhD Candidate in the Lenhart Lab, was awarded First Place for Outstanding Senior Graduate Student Poster. 

Current University of Montana Professor Nicholas R. Natale (BS ‘76 PhD ‘79) received the Drexel Chemistry Distinguished Alumnus Award. This award acknowledges Dr. Natale’s contributions to the field of chemistry throughout his decades-long career. After receiving this honor, Dr. Natale held a seminar to share his scope of work with Drexel faculty and students.

Grants

Kathleen Powell, PhD, assistant research professor of criminology and justice studies, was awarded a $544k grant from the William T. Grant Foundation for a project that will examine the impact of the legalization and decriminalization of recreational marijuana in New Jersey, and specifically how some of the potential racial inequalities in prior enforcement hindered the social development of young adults. 

Writers Room’s Second Story Collective project received a grant from the PA Department of Commerce and Economic Development’s Neighborhood Assistance Program. 

Publications

Teaching Professor of Philosophy Stacey Ake, PhD, published an essay, “It’s All About the Benjamins!” in The Pluralist. 

Professors of Sociology Susan Bell, PhD, and Kelly Joyce, PhD, collaborated with other sociologists on "Five Big Ideas About AI,” published in Contexts.  

Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies Jakeya Caruthers, PhD, co-edited the first volume of Abolition Feminisms: Organizing, Survival, and Transformative Practice, out now via Haymarket Books. A second volume is slated for publication later this year.  

Professor of Biodiversity, Earth and Environmental Science Ted Daeschler, PhD’s description of a new genus and species of finned tetrapodomorph from Ellesmere Island, Canada, was published in Nature. 

Assistant Professor of Sociology Xiaorui Huang, PhD, coauthored “Silent Spring at 60: Assessing environmentalism in the cranberry treadmill of production in Massachusetts” in the Journal of Rural Studies.  

Henry Israeli, MFA, associate teaching professor of English, co-edited Lords of Misrule: 20 Years of Saturnalia Books, an anthology of almost 190 poems published during the last two decades by Saturnalia Books, of which Israeli is the founding publisher.

Professor of Criminology and Justice Studies Robert J. Kane, PhD, published a book, Policing Beyond Coercion: A New Idea for a Twenty-First Century Mandate, which lays out a roadmap for reimagining the police as a public institution.

Professor Emeritus of English Stephen Mandell, PhD, co-authored the fifth edition of Practical Argument: A Text and Anthology. 

Abby Mayer, doctoral candidate in the Communication, Culture and Media program, co-authored a paper, “Framing and Word Choice in Childhood Obesity Reduction-Focused Advertising,” in the Journal of Managerial Issues, examining the effects of specific obesity descriptors and the overall message framing on reactions to advertising seeking to reduce childhood obesity rates and promote healthier behavior. 

Marina Potapova, PhD, associate professor of biodiversity, earth and environmental science published "A harmonized dataset of sediment diatoms from hundreds of lakes in the northeastern United States" in Nature’s Scientific Data and “Aulacoseira newjerseyana sp. nov. (Bacillariophyta) a new freshwater centric diatom species from the northeastern USA” in Diatom Research.

Gordon Richards, PhD, professor of physics, and Trevor McCaffrey '23 published “Kiloparsec-scale Radio Structure in z ∼ 0.25 Radio-quiet QSOs” in The Astronomical Journal. 

Kelly Underman PhD, assistant professor of sociology, and research assistant Merlin Kochunilathil published “Online student culture as site for negotiating assessment in medical education” in Social Science & Medicine.

Associate Professor of Communication Asta Zelenkauskiate, PhD, published a book, Creating Chaos Online: Disinformation and Subverted Post-Publics, via University of Michigan Press.

Presentations

English faculty members Brenda Copeland, Nomi Eve, Amy Impellizerri, Matt Smith, Scott Stein and Bill Vargo presented at the Push to Publish conference hosted at Drexel by the MFA in Creative Writing program last month.   

Two Physics PhD students presented their research at the American Physical Society Division of Nuclear Physics Fall Meeting in New Orleans. Brady Eckert presented "Evaluation of Bremsstrahlung Models for nEXO Simulations," and Shashank Jayakumar presented "The PROSPECT-II Detector Upgrade."

Professor of Biodiversity, Earth and Environmental Science Sean O'Donnell, PhD, will be an invited speaker at an interdisciplinary conference focusing on climate change's effects on animals' nervous systems at the Kavli Foundation in Los Angeles this month. These meetings were largely inspired by O’Donnell’s 2018 paper, “The neurobiology of climate change,” in Science of Nature, and draw an impressive array of speakers from around the world.