Research @ Pace
A newsletter highlighting faculty research & scholarship
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Theresa K. Lant, PhD (Management and Management Science, Lubin School of Business) is Distinguished Professor of Management and Academic Director of the Arts and Entertainment Management Program. Professor Lant in an internationally recognized scholar whose research examines learning and adaptation in teams and organizations, with a focus on creativity and technological innovation. Her research explores the integration of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries, particularly in contexts that require large scale project teams composed of experts from multiple fields. Prof. Lant is one of a growing group of management and organizations scholars contributing to the emerging field of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary team science and is a founding member of the International Network for the Science of Team Science (INSciTS). She received a National Science Foundation grant to study and train interdisciplinary medical research teams at major medical institutions around the country. Her research on integrative capacity in interdisciplinary teams was highlighted in the National Research Council 2015 report on Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Science . Her publications in this area include conceptual, empirical, and practitioner articles on enhancing interdisciplinary collaboration,
Prof. Lant is a practitioner of interdisciplinary collaboration as well as a scholar. She provides training, facilitation, and evaluation to interdisciplinary teams in science, medicine, and engineering. She currently serves as team science evaluator at the Louisville Automation and Robotics Research Institute. She is also a contributing developer of the TeamMapps Translational Research Management Training Modules at the Institute for Translational Sciences at utmbHealth. Prof. Lant is an active supporter of the arts and arts education and serves as Chair of the Executive Board of Directors at Arc Stages in Pleasantville, NY, a non-profit live theatre organization that provides educational programming, community, and professional theatre.
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Emily Bent, PhD is Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies Department. Her research interests include girl-led social justice movements, girls’ human rights, and intergenerational feminist activism. Her work articulates the essential contributions of girl activists to social justice and equality-driven movements; she draws from over two decades of intergenerational feminist organizing and nonprofit experience, including her service as the United Nations representative for Girls Learn International, to scaffold girl leaders’ voices and visions of a more just future.
Professor Bent was recently awarded funding from the Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF) for the Feminist Girls Project, a gender equality and human rights training program to prepare over one hundred high school student delegates working with Girls Learn International. Professor Bent developed the program in collaboration with several girl-centered nonprofit organizations engaged in advocacy at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). The initiative builds off Professor Bent’s research on girl activism and leadership at the United Nations, helping to prepare and facilitate opportunities for girls and youth to inform global processes for gender equality and human rights.
Professor Bent’s recent publications include “When Girls Lead: Changing the Playbook of Climate Justice” (with Chueh-Tsun Huang, a Pace University student class of 2020) in Girlhood Studies Journal 15.2; “This is not another girls power story: Reading Emma Gonzáles as Public Feminist Intellectual” in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 45.4; “Reflections on Expanding Girls’ Political Capital in the United Nations,” Girlhood Studies Journal 13:2, and “Unfiltered and Unapologetic: March for our Lives and the Political Boundaries of Age,” Jeunesse, Young People, Texts, Cultures 11.2.
Her manuscript Girls in Global Development: Theoretical Contestations, Empirical Demands, (Switzer, Heather, Karishma Desai and Emily Bent (eds.) Transnational Girlhoods Book Series, New York, NY: Berghahn Books, is currently under contract.
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Zhan Zhang, PhD, (Information Technology, NY, Seidenberg School of CSIS) received a $499,996 NSF award for his project titled HCC: CAREER: Co-Designing Hands-Free Cognitive Aids with Fast-Paced Medical Teams.
Humans have limited capacity for processing information and recognizing critical events, which can lead to errors when this capacity is exceeded. In safety-critical areas such as medicine, such errors can lead to serious consequences, especially in the many cases where these errors might be preventable. A common cause of medical errors is when health workers lack situational awareness—knowing what is going on within an environment and predicting what is likely to happen next—and make mistakes based on this lack of awareness. This project looks to reduce these mistakes through developing novel computing and interaction techniques that support situational awareness for physically and cognitively preoccupied health workers who are part of emergency medical services (EMS) teams that provide urgent medical care in the field. The research team will work closely with EMS providers to understand their cognitive needs and develop hands-free, minimally distracting cognitive aids that support their situational awareness and decision-making in fast-paced crisis response situations.
The overarching goal of this research is to determine how to support fast-response medical teams’ awareness of context-specific information and activities while accounting for their limited capacity in processing information and ability to interact with handheld computing devices while doing their job. The project is structured around three main aims. The first is to deeply understand the cognitive needs of care providers during time-critical medical events; this will be accomplished by analyzing simulation videos, eye-tracking data, and artifacts, along with observational field studies and interviews with EMS workers. The second is to design and develop hands-free cognitive aids for fast-response medical teams, through a series of participatory design workshops and usability evaluation activities grounded in socio-technical models of health information technology implementation. The third is to conduct summative assessment of a functional prototype through deploying them in training simulations, measuring task performance and patient outcomes along with affects on workers’ situational awareness and cognitive load. Together, the research will produce scientific knowledge and implications related to situation awareness, hands-free technologies, and human computer interaction. The project will also promote interdisciplinary education and research through involving a diverse group of high school, undergraduate, and graduate students, while providing the basis for developing a rich outreach program to medical workers and health technology industry partners.
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Meng Xu, PhD (Mathematics, NYC, Dyson College of Arts and Sciences) published "Daily Covid-19 infected population densities in Italian provinces follow Taylor’s law" in Mathematical Population Studies (Jan. 2023). This is a joint work with Italian demographers Federico Benassi, PhD, and Alessia Naccarato, PhD. Together, the researchers used Taylor's law to detect spatial patterns of Covid-19 daily cases and analyzed the effect of government control on Taylor's law, during the first year of the pandemic. |
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Mary Kaltenberg, PhD (Economics, NYC, Dyson College of Arts and Sciences) published “Invention and the life course: Age differences in patenting” in Research Policy (January 2023). The following are the main fingins from the research:
- Developed a new database of the age of U.S. residing inventors from patents
- Older inventors have more backward citations and originality measures.
- Younger inventors have more forward citations, number of claims, and generality measures.
- These patterns are consistent with age-related changes in fluid and crystalized intelligence.
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Michael Finewood, PhD (Environmental Studies and Science, PLV, Dyson College of Arts and Sciences) published “Institutionalizing Barriers to Access? An Equity Scan of Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) Incentive Programs in the United States” in the Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning (January 2023). The paper was co-authored with a Pace student. Green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) is part of a suite of sustainability initiatives that are vital to tackling climate change. However, siloed governance structures that traditionally implement stormwater infrastructure are not well-suited to address the cross-cutting goals of such initiatives (i.e. incorporating social equity along with technological aspects). Equity planning centers social equity in policy development and can help ameliorate this siloing. Here, we apply equity planning concepts to examine GSI incentive programs developed in the United States to address current funding gaps. The authors explore GSI incentive programs included in federally-mandated Stormwater Management Plans (SWMPs). Programs found through a scan of readily available SWMPs ranged from $20 rebates to $500,000 grants, providing a range of opportunities. However, closer analysis of application materials suggests potential institutionalization of inequality through restricted access. Barriers to accessing these programs can limit participation by marginalized or under-resourced communities and instead redirect scarce resources to communities who already have strong capacity. Thus, the authors argue that centering equity in the development of sustainability incentives and conducting meaningful equity analysis should be applied to GSI programs to reform practice and avoid institutionalizing inequity.
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Sethu Karthikeyan, PhD (Communication Sciences and Disorders, NYC, College of Health Professions), together with her colleague, Vijay Ramachandra, PhD, published “Shape and Taste of Words May Make Them Easier to Learn and Remember,” ASHA leader (Jan./Feb.2023) , the official magazine of the American Speech-Language- Hearing Association. The article explores the nature of a subset of words that are either systematic in their sound combinations and meaning connections, or the constituent sounds resemble some aspect of the things/events these words refer to; it discusses the potential utility of these kinds of words in evaluating and facilitating language in those who exhibit atypical performance.
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Darren Hayes, PhD (Information Technology, NYC, Seidenberg School of CSIS), in collaboration with Dr. Riccardo Maiolini, Cabot University (Rome), Dr. Stefano Franco, LUISS (Rome), and Dr. Francesco Cappa, Campus Bio-Medico (Rome), published a peer-reviewed journal article entitled ”Optimizing Reward-Based Crowdfunding,” in the IEEE Engineering Management Review (February 2023). Online crowdfunding for innovative products and services, has grown exponentially in recent times, and is an effective alternative to traditional bank and venture capital funding. There are more than 2,000 active web-based platforms that have raised $14 billion for new businesses. Crowdfunding is expected to grow to $30 billion by 2025. This research paper explores how organizations that launch crowdfunding programs can understand how to motivate people to contribute financially, while detailing the expectations of those who fund innovation. Optimizing the type of reward, for financial backers, is extremely important to crowdfunding campaigns and to the success of a new product or service. |  | |
David Boerma, PhD, (Biology, NYC, Dyson College of Arts and Sciences), along with his colleagues, published “By a Whisker: The Sensory Role of Vibrissae in Hovering Flight in Nectarivorous Bats” in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (February 2023). Nectar-drinking bats have many unique adaptations compared to other bat species. Two of these are the fact that they use hovering flight to access nectar from flowering plants (much like hummingbirds do), and that they sport a forward-facing arrangement of brush-like vibrissae (whiskers) around their muzzle. The study tested the hypothesis that nectarivorous bats use tactile information from their vibrissae to help position their heads within deep-bodied flowers while they hover to feed. The researchers combined experimental approaches from high-speed videography of nectar-feeding bats and measurements of museum specimens to explore this previously unstudied sensory aspect of a fascinating neotropical flower-pollinator system. |  | |
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Anne Toomey, PhD (Environmental Studies and Science NYC, Dyson College of Arts and Sciences) and Monica Palta, PhD ((Environmental Studies and Science NYC, Dyson College of Arts and Sciences), published “Towards a Pedagogy of Social‑Ecological Collaborations: Engaging Students and Urban Nonprofits for an Ecology with Cities” in Urban Ecosystems (February 2023), an article about an experiential learning-based class that they ran at a small park in northern Manhattan last fall (2021). The other authors on the paper were Cam Becker, an undergraduate student, and Jason Smith, the manager of the park. The concept of ecology with cities calls for a broader scope of participatory research and pedagogical tools for engagement with urban environmental issues. Projects that take an ecology with cities approach can provide opportunities for diverse audiences, including students, teachers, community members, and scientists, to participate in urban ecology, thus serving as potential steppingstones for further engagement. While there is increasing scholarship on the value of participatory approaches for increasing ecological literacy (e.g. citizen science), less has been written on the collaborative process of such experiences, particularly the social science aspects that can lead to successful outcomes and lessons learned. This paper describes a collaborative research project that engaged undergraduate students and community outreach staff of an urban nonprofit organization to better understand social uses and values associated with a public park located on the Harlem River in New York City. The authors explore the outcomes of the project for both students and staff, and provide reflections for educators interested in using a pedagogy of social-ecological collaborations in urban contexts. This study argues that such an approach facilitates engagement between universities and community-based nonprofits to engage students in learning about the complexity, uncertainty, and value of urban ecosystem management.
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Mariana Graciano, PhD (Modern Languages and Cultures, NYC, Dyson College of Arts and Sciences), the 2021 recipient of the Book and Performance Completion Award, has published O ar in Argentina. The book is written in Spanish and the title is in Galician. O ar --"the air" --is the intersection of two experiences: being a daughter and a mother, taking root and being uprooted. It is a memoir with an epistolary form, the entanglement of two long letters: The first one written by Professor Graciano’s grandmother Candela –born in Argentina in 1930, daughter of Galician immigrants–addressed to Prof. Graciano. The other, written by Professor Graciano –an Argentinian immigrant in the US– addressed to her daughter, Nia born in New York in 2018.
O ar reconstructs our affective memory as a legacy for Nia, and others. It is an inventory of everything there is so that nothing is lost: tangos, photos, letters, sayings. It is about migration, economic crises, the struggle of the working class, gender roles, the desire to live, and illness. O ar is, above all, a book about the air, that which "infects" us all.
In the US the book is available here.
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Opportunities for Faculty | |
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Classroom-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences Award
The Pace University Office of Research invites proposals for funding of up to $5,000 to support the incorporation of authentic research and creative inquiry projects into the undergraduate curriculum. We are particularly interested in proposals that will create research experiences across disciplines and schools in courses that are dedicated (partly or entirely) to first-year students. Our goal is to make unique classroom-based research projects part of our first-year students’ introduction to Pace and to the experiential pedagogy that distinguishes Pace undergraduate education.
Application guidelines and template are available here
Application deadline: Friday, March 24, 2023
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Congratulations to the Spring 2023 Book and Performance Completion Awards Winners!
Sarah Blackwood, PhD, English (NYC), Dyson College of Arts and Sciences
Women's Work: Writing for Children at Mid-Century, 1960-1980
Cathryn Lavery, PhD, Criminal Justice and Security (PLV), Dyson College of Arts and Sciences
Social & Political Risk Management: Assessing and Managing Global Insecurity
John-Vincent Mercanti, PhD, Performing Arts (NYC), Dyson College of Arts and Sciences
Breaking the Stigma: Musical Theater Acting
Joseph Morreale, PhD, Economics (NYC), Dyson College of Arts and Sciences
Irrational Behavior of the Rational Man: Behavioral Economics and Real Human Decision-Making with Applications to Public Policy
Nils Myszkowski, PhD, Psychology (NYC), Dyson College of Arts and Sciences
Item Response Theory for creativity measurement: A Primer
Meghana Nayak, PhD, Political Science/Women's and Gender Studies (NYC), Dyson College of Arts and Sciences
The World Keeps the Score: Intergenerational Trauma and Global Politics
Learn more about the winning proposals
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Distinguished Professor Presentations
Theresa Lant, PhD, Management and Management Science, PLV, Lubin School of Business
"Growing the TEAM in Team Science: Creating New Knowledge Across Disciplinary Boundaries"
Tuesday, March 7, 3:25 p.m.–4:25 p.m.
Presentation will include a panel discussion with:
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John Damiao, PhD, Occupational Therapy (PLV), College of Health Professions
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Julia Eisenberg, PhD, Management and Management Science (PlV), Lubin School of Business
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Kelly Kreitz, PhD, English (NYC), Dyson College of Arts and Sciences
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Supawadee (Cindy) Lee, PhD, CH, Occupational Therapy (PLV), College of Health Professions
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Pauline Mosley, PhD, Information Technology West (PLV), Seidenberg School of CSIS
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Jennifer Pankowski, EdD, School of Education (NYC)
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Zhan Zhang, PhD, Information Technology (NYC), Seidenberg School of CSIS
Distinguished Professor Presentation Registration
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the event.
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Criminal Justice and the Prison System Seminar
Michael Mushlin, JD, Elisabeth Haub School of Law
The Vanishing 8th Amendment: Justice Thomas and Prisoners' Rights
Tuesday, March 14, 12:45 p.m.–1:45 p.m.
Criminal Justice And The Prison System Registration
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the event.
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Pace School of Education Research Symposium
Thursday, April 27, 3:30 p.m.–6:30 p.m.
School of Education Research Symposium Registration
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the event.
Additional details to follow
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Center for Undergraduate Research Experiences (CURE)
The Center for Undergraduate Research Experiences is now accepting applications for the Spring Research Days and the Summer Research Award Program!
Spring 2023 Undergraduate Research and Creative Inquiry Days
CALL FOR APPLICATIONS TO PRESENT!
Tuesday, May 2, 2023 | NYC Campus
Friday, May 5, 2023 | PLV Campus
The Undergraduate Research and Creative Inquiry Days May 2 (NYC) and May 5 (PLV) will showcase undergraduates from across the schools and colleges who have engaged in faculty-mentored research and creative inquiry during the academic year. Students will have produced scholarly or artistic work as part of a course-based research or creative inquiry assignment, award program, co-curricular project, or in fulfillment of their Senior Capstone or Honors College thesis requirement. Please encourage your students to apply to present!
Apply Here to Present!
Deadline to apply: Thursday, March 30, 2023
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Summer 2023 Provost’s Student-Faculty Undergraduate Research/
Creative Inquiry Award Program
This summer research program is for undergraduate students who will be entering their sophomore, junior, or senior year in Fall 2023. This internal funding opportunity supports faculty-mentored scholarly and artistic projects developed in courses and research settings that will benefit from in-depth development over the summer months. Please sponsor an outstanding student for this funding opportunity!
Apply Here!
Deadline to apply: Monday, April 3, 2023
Faculty Reviewers
We are seeking faculty members from across the schools and colleges who are interested in serving as reviewers for the undergraduate research award program. Contact us if this service opportunity interests you.
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Spring 2023 Student Undergraduate Research Webinar Series
Monday common hour - 12:10 p.m.- 1:10 p.m.
Tuesday common hour - 3:25 p.m. - 4:25 p.m.
Getting Started in Research/Creative Projects Year-Round
02/27/23 and 02/28/23
How to prepare a Research Proposal
03/06/23 and 03/07/23
Designing a Poster for Presentation
04/17/23 and 04/18/23
Register in advance for Monday's meeting
Register in advance for Tuesday's meeting
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
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Prestigious Awards and Fellowships | |
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U.S. Fulbright Program
The U.S. Fulbright program offers recent graduates the opportunity to earn a graduate degree, conduct independent research or teach English abroad. Students who are U.S. citizens with any major are eligible to apply. Pace has a long history of successful Fulbright applicants and it would be great to continue the tradition in the next application cycle. Please encourage your students to attend an information session on March 28th
at 2:00. Representatives of the Fulbright program will join the session and there will be time for individual questions. Students can register at this link.
For questions contact Moira Egan, Director of Prestigious Fellowships and Awards at megan@pace.edu.
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