Faculty Highlights: Grants and Awards From Winter 2018

In this section, Drexel Quarterly provides an update on research funding, commercialization activity and faculty honors at Drexel, courtesy of the Office of the Provost. This update offers a snapshot of activity during the winter term.

Sponsored Research

John Rich, MD, a professor of health management and policy in the Dornsife School of Public Health and co-director of the Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice, and Ted Corbin, MD, co-director of the Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice and its Healing Hurt People program and an associate professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine in the College of Medicine, received a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Forward Promise Empowering Projects grant for $447,863. This new grant will go toward the Center’s Healing Hurt People program and will support the training and hiring of new community health worker peers, as well as expanding the program’s focus on culturally responsive healing practices, including storytelling.

John Bethea, PhD, a professor and department head of biology in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Veronica Tom, PhD, an associate professor of neurobiology and anatomy in the College of Medicine, were awarded a $2,497,558 grant from the National Institutes of Health for the project “Soluble TNFa in the Development of Autonomic Dysreflexia after Spinal Cord Injury.”

Gordon Richards, PhD, and Michael Vogeley, PhD, both professors of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, received a $27,000 award from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Corporation to support research co-op positions for two physics undergraduates.

Shannon Capps, PhD, an assistant professor in the College of Engineering’s Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, has been awarded a three-year, $269,000 grant through the NASA (Early Career) Investigator Program in Earth Science for proposed work entitled “Assimilating Ammonia Observations to Improve Emissions Impact Estimates.”

Yinghui Zhong, PhD, an associate professor in the School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems, and colleagues at the University of Miami received a one-year, $144,000 NIH R01 grant for the project titled “Targeting Lipid Clearance Pathways To Promote Repair After Spinal Cord Injury (SCI).” Zhong and colleagues also received a one-year, $120,000 Coulter-Drexel Translational Research Partnership Program grant for the project titled “Injectable Hydrogel Delivering Therapeutic Levels of Minocycline.”

Kambiz Pourrezaei, PhD, a professor in the School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems, and colleagues received a 2018 Commonwealth Universal Research Enhancement (CURE) grant for the project titled, “Implications of Unstable Cerebral Oxygenation on the Safety and Tolerability of Hemodialysis.”

Major Gifts, Honors and Recognition

School of Education Dean and Distinguished University Professor Nancy Songer, PhD, was invited and accepted to serve as an editorial board member for the American Educational Research Journal, one of the American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) premiere journals.

Christian Edge, the School of Education’s director of K-12 school work, was named “Educator of the Year” by the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. He will be formally honored at the 2018 Celebration of Educators and Education Alumni Awards on May 12.

Renee Turchi, MD, an associate professor in the Dornsife School of Public Health’s Department of Community Health and Prevention, was named Pennsylvania Pediatrician of the Year by the state chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. She is also now a member of the City of Philadelphia’s A Running Start: Health children’s health committee.

Janet Fleetwood, PhD, a professor of Community Health and Prevention at the Dornsife School of Public Health, was appointed to the board of Together for West Philadelphia, which is a coalition of groups working on a range of issues (health, education, food justice, etc.).

Jason Orne, PhD, an assistant professor of sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences, was elected to the American Sociological Association Task Force on the status of LGBTQ persons in sociology.

André Carrington, PhD, an assistant professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences, was named one of 50 Fellows at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University for the 2018-2019 academic year. He is the first Drexel faculty member to become a Radcliffe Fellow. The fellowship, for the project “Audiofuturism: The Transatlantic Circuit of Science Fiction Radio Drama,” includes a stipend of $77,500.

Julia Stoyanovich, PhD, an assistant professor of computer science in the College of Computing & Informatics, received a CAREER Award, one of the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty. The NSF grant will support research on her project titled “Querying Evolving Graphs,” which aims to provide systematic support for scalable querying and analytics over evolving graphs.

Nick Anselmo, a teaching professor of performing arts in the Westphal College of Media Arts & Design and director of the theatre program, received a Picasso Project Grant from Public Citizens for Children and Youth to run The Mantua Theater Project with the Science and Leadership Academy Middle School. The program will culminate in a performance of 12 new student-written plays performed by local Philadelphia Professional artists in the URBN Annex Black Box Theater on June 3.

Leslie Lamberson, PhD, an assistant professor in the College of Engineering’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics, received a five-year National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program award for her work, “Integrated Research and Education on the Dynamic Behavior of Metal-ceramic Layered Solids.”

Ekaterina Pomerantseva, PhD, an assistant professor in the College of Engineering’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, received a five-year National Science Foundation CAREER grant to create a completely new class of materials with advanced charge storage capabilities, opening the door for next-generation batteries with higher energy density, faster charging and longer lifetime. This is her fourth NSF award since 2016.

Distinguished University and Charles T. and Ruth M. Bach Professor Yury Gogosti, PhD, and assistant professors Steven May, PhD, and Andrew Magenau, PhD, all in the College of Engineering’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering along with research assistant professor Babak Anasori, PhD, were named 2017 Highly Cited Researchers by Clarivate Analytics. This is an annual listing of scientists whose publications over the previous 10 years have included a notable number of highly cited papers, placing them in the top 1 percent of their academic field, a distinctive recognition at the global level.

Caroline Schauer, PhD, an associate professor and Hoeganaes Associate Professor Mitra Taheri, both of the College of Engineering’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, completed the Executive Leadership in Academic Technology and Engineering (ELATE at Drexel®) leadership development program. ELATE is a national program designed to advance senior women faculty in academic engineering, computer science, and related fields into effective institutional leadership roles within their schools and universities. Schauer and Taheri are the only two faculty members from Drexel selected as 2017-18 ELATE Fellows.

As the 2018-2019 Department of State Air Quality Fellow for the US Embassy in Nepal, Peter DeCarlo, PhD, an assistant professor in the College of Engineering’s Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, has been working to help the embassy develop a clean air app for smartphones that provides real-time air quality information and interpretation.

Franco Montalto, PhD, an associate professor in the College of Engineering’s Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, was invited to join a team of researchers and practitioners who are developing a proposal to the Green Climate Fund on behalf of the island nation of Grenada. Part of the Paris Agreement, the Green Climate Fund helps developing countries prepare for climate change. The contingent traveled to Grenada in February to meet with high-level government representatives and other stakeholders. Their proposal will be finalized in March.