Noteworthy

A group of nine staff members provided a home cooked meal to families at the Ronald McDonald House of Delaware on Feb. 14. The Ronald McDonald House provides a "home-away-from-home" for families of children seeking medical treatment at local hospitals. The volunteers included Mary Aruffo (Registrar's Office), Maureen McKellar (Financial Aid), Stefanie Shepherd (Financial Aid), Colleen (Financial Aid), Trudy Depew (Social Science), Carol Smith (Bursar's Office), RoseAnne Kalodner (Purchasing), Aimee Guzowski (Center for Education), and Michelle Keller (Mechanical Engineering).

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Professor Barbara Patterson has been named editor of the National League for Nursing’s peer-reviewed journal Nursing Education Perspectives. This accomplishment comes after years of experience with the publication in various capacities, including most recently as editor of the Research Briefs section. As editor, Dr. Patterson will lead the journal toward its mission of advancing nursing education through meaningful scholarship that informs the next generation of nursing professionals, educators, and leaders.

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Widener University's Center for Human Sexuality Studies and Delta State University co-hosted the 'Delta Focus Conference 2020: A Spotlight on Sexual Health' from Feb. 6 - 8 in Cleveland, Mississippi. The grassroots conference was supported by ViiV Healthcare's Accelerate Initiative and gave the community an opportunity to consider and gain insight on topics affecting the sexual health of people in the Mississippi Delta and surrounding areas. The conference sought to expand the skills and awareness of community health professionals through interactive workshops, thematic plenaries, and community listening sessions. Conference presenters from Widener included Javontae Lee Williams, who was conference co-chair and is an applied research scientist at Widener's Interdisciplinary Sexuality Research Collaborative.

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Dr. Catherine Kirn-Safran, an assistant teaching professor of biology, has recently co-authored two peer-reviewed research articles. One article, titled "Perlecan/Hspg2 deficiency impairs bone's calcium signaling and associated transcriptome in response to mechanical loading," was published in the February 2020 issue of Bone. The other article, titled "Trabecular Bone Deficit and Enhanced Anabolic Response to Re-Ambulation after Disuse in Perlecan-Deficient Skeleton," was published in Biomolecules in January 2020.

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Dr. Jordan Smith, assistant professor of history, has been awarded a prestigious $20,000 National Endowment for the Humanities Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia. The nationally competitive, semester-long fellowship will support him as he writes the final chapter of his book “The Invention of Rum” based on his research into the invention and production of rum in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British Atlantic world.

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Widener awarded Professor of English Janine Utell and Librarian Molly Wolf a Faculty Development Grant for a Human Sexuality Archives project entitled “Early 20th-Century Sexuality and Culture: A Guide to the Archive.” A continuation of a Summer Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity (SURCA) project led by an undergraduate student research assistant, the goal is to create a digital resource to be housed on the library website page for the Human Sexuality Archives and available to researchers interested in early 20th-century cultures and texts of sexuality and sexology. As there is a wealth of material in this area available in the Human Sexuality Archives the aim is to make this material discoverable and usable to other researchers through an annotated guide focusing on early 20th-century memoirs, marriage and hygiene manuals, and other sexological texts.

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Assistant Professor Claudia Guerrazzi was recently published in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics. Her work is entitled "Health information exchange: What matters at the organizational level?"

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Assistant Professor of Marketing Dan Li was featured in a video for the SAGE Research Methods Video Collection on Market Research Methods. The video focuses on her research on consumer happiness using experimental design and was filmed at the Winter American Marketing Association conference.

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Kayla Van Osten, affiliate librarian and assistant archivist, presented a poster entitled “Solving the Mystery: The Quest for an Interactive First Year Orientation” at the Pennsylvania Library Association's annual conference. Her presentation focused on the library's initiative to create a dynamic and active orientation for first year students which included an interactive mystery event introducing students to library services, resources, and staff.

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Dr. Joseph Hargadon, professor of accounting, co-authored an article entitled "Dual Certification: It Can Be Done" in the August 2019 issue of Strategic Finance. The article prescribes a unique study plan whereby accounting majors can design their undergraduate curriculum to pass both the Uniform Certified Public Accountant (CPA) examination and the Certified Management Accountant (CMA) examination within six months after graduation. The article has been cited and reprinted by the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) as a recruiting tool to increase awareness of the benefits to students for joining the IMA. He also presented a one-hour IMA Inside Talk Faculty Friday webinar with his co-author, Dr. Lori Fuller, on Oct. 25. Finally, DePaul University School of Accountancy adopted the study program prescribed in this article.

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The Widener Robotics Team secured a spot in this year's VEX U Robotics World Tournament. The team will move on to compete against 1,200 of the best student-led teams from around the world to earn the title of robotics world champion.

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Paula Gray, professor and director of the Family (Individual Across the Lifespan) CRNP program, has been named to the Pennsylvania Department of Health’s (PDOH) Safe and Effective Prescribing Practices Task Force. Dr. Gray will serve on the task force as the representative of the Pennsylvania State Nurses’ Association (PSNA). Convened by Gov. Tom Wolf, the task force was created to combat the opioid epidemic affecting the Commonwealth by developing and adopting guidelines for health care providers on the safe and effective use of opioids in the treatment of pain. 

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Widener Sports Information Director Chad Cooper recently attended the fifth-annual Common Ground think tank conference presented by the NCAA Office of Inclusion, held at the University of Texas at Austin Nov. 12 and 13. The event brought together members of the LGBTQ+ community and representatives of higher education institutions for conversations on common ground. It was the second consecutive year the NCAA invited Cooper’s participation at the event.

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Education Professor Kim O'Halloran published "Multidisciplinary Community Mental Health Clinics: Opportunities and Challenges for Counselor Educators" in the Journal of Counselor Leadership and Advocacy October 2019 issue. O’Halloran also serves as associate provost and dean for Graduate Studies & Extended Learning.

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Widener University President Julie E. Wollman discusses her presentation to the institution's President's Council, "The Changing Landscape of Higher Education."

The President's Council is the university's premier giving association, made up of alumni, parents friends, faculty, and staff. At a November gathering of the group, Dr. Wollman engaged members in a discussion regarding the challenges facing higher education, their impact on Widener, and the university's strategy for future success.

Listen Now

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Seven nursing faculty and two nursing PhD alumni are published in the October/December 2019 issue of Nursing Forum, a peer-reviewed journal that aims to explore, explicate or report issues, ideas, trends and innovations that shape the nursing profession. As the largest number of Widener faculty and alumni represented in a single journal at one time, the research topics range from high stakes testing, the role of nurses on governing boards, student veterans in nursing education, and the impact of table top exercises.

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Angélique Gravely, a master of education student, was selected to be the 2019-2020 Frankel Adair Scholar by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania (ACLU-PA). The scholarship provides $1,500 in support of post-secondary education to an LGBQ&T student residing in the greater Philadelphia area.

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Several students in adjunct English and writing professor Tamara Oakman’s ENGL 102 and 116 course had poems accepted in Moonstone Arts Center’s New Voices program for emerging poets under the age of 25. The program creates a platform for young poets by welcoming them into a larger Philadelphia poetry collaborative and giving them the opportunity to share their work with a wide audience. The published students include Alyssa Barlow, Richard Bearden III, Taylor Berkheimer, Emily Caruso, Emily DeLuca, Noah Gabay, Lazaros Gouvas, Kentz Gustave, Sara Khalil, Mitchell Mackesy, Aimee Schwartz and Jaime Zima. Caruso and Schwartz read their poetry at a related event on Nov. 17.

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Annalisa Castaldo, an associate professor of English, participated in the Blackfriars Conference Staging Sessions at the American Shakespeare Center, where her pitch to have the company perform Thomas Kyd's "The Spanish Tragedy" was selected for future production.

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Janine Utell, professor and chair of English, recently wrote a book "Literary Couples and 20th-Century Life Writing," which was published by Bloomsbury. Exposing how modernist and late-modernist writers tell the stories of their intimate relationships though life writing, the book engages with the process by which these authors become subjects to a significant other, a change that subsequently becomes narrative within their works. Looking specifically at partners in a couple, Utell focuses on such literary pairings as Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

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