Noteworthy

Janelle Williams, associate dean of Graduate & Continuing Studies, was selected to receive a scholarship for the Bethaida "Bea" Gonzalez Diversity in Leadership Scholars Program from the University Professional and Continuing Education Association (UPCEA). The program's goal is to equip diverse professionals at any stage of their career with the skills and knowledge needed to move into leadership positions on campus, in the field of Professional, Continuing, and Online Education, and in UPCEA.

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Dr. Susan P. Schaming, an associate professor and director of Graduate Counselor Education and Home School Visitation Programs, has been appointed to the Pennsylvania Counseling Association's Anti-Racism Task force. The purpose of this task force is to begin assessing needs and charting a direction to take an active role in making changes in Pennsylvania, while working towards increasing cultural humility and answering the call to action in bringing positive change to those who have been disproportionately affected by racial inequality.

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John Suarez, associate professor of electrical engineering, was named a senior member of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). This national distinction is given to active faculty, scientists and administrators who have demonstrated remarkable innovation producing technologies that have made an impact, or have the potential to make an impact, on the welfare of society. Prof. Suarez was chosen for his work aimed at improving radio communications through the use of a patented opto-cancellation system that uses radio-frequency signals to reduce interference in radio transmissions. The novel system allows low-power radio signals to be received in the presence of powerful interference 100 times stronger than a signal of interest. It has been applied to broadcast, cellular, satellite and marine communications.

In addition to his faculty position at Widener, Prof. Suarez is also an affiliated faculty in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Delaware, a member institution of the NAI. 
 

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Margo Campbell and Linda Houser, both associate professors in Widener's Center for Social Work Education, published an article in June 2020 in "Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Services." The article, titled "Connecting Caregiver Wages and Distress: Felt Precarity, Parenting, and Child Behavior," focused on employed mothers experiences of felt precarity, an emotional reaction to structurally generated vulnerability. Their study linked wages, a potential source of precarity, to well-being using a family stress model of economic hardship.

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School of Business Administration Professor Yvonne Antonucci, Associate Professor Annetta Fortune, and Mathias Kirchmer of BPM-D published an article in the Business Process Management Journal in July 2020. The article, titled "An examination of associations between business process management capabilities and the benefits of digitalization: all capabilities are not equal," examined the associations of BPM capabilities across direct and indirect digitalization benefits and extended prior research examining the value of BPM capabilities in organizations.

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Dr. Robert Bonk, a professor of professional writing who is internationally known for his research, workshops, and presentations, was recently named Honorary Vice President Collaborative Writing Initiatives by the Communication Institute of Greece (ComInG). This honor recognizes his most recent accomplishment serving as lead researcher and lead author for an international project examining the responses of higher education to the COVID-19 pandemic in seven nations.

The article, titled "Pedagogy in the Time of Pandemic: From Localisation to Glocalisation," is currently in press at the Journal of Education, Innovation, and Communication. He also served as guest editor and co-authored the preface for the June 2020 special issue of the journal.

Active as an Ambassador and Academic Conference Committee member, Bonk presented at the ComInG 2019 Conference and had been invited to lead writing workshops at the 2020 Conference. He was previously honored as a Fellow of the American Medical Writers Association. Bonk also recently edited and provided a poem and photo for the ComInG motivational book "Why is it worth waking up every morning? Impressions and reflections on inspiration, motivation, and collaboration."

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Associate Professor Zora Wolfe, director of K-12 educational leadership programs, and alumna Jeanne McCarthy '20 EdD co-authored two peer-reviewed manuscripts in the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education's "Teaching, Technology, and Teacher Education During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Stories from the Field" publication.

The first manuscript, "Engaging Parents Through School-Wide Strategies for Online Instruction," focused on how they assisted a school in revisiting their school-wide processes and online learning plan to incorporate parent-centered, school-wide strategies that supported students and parents learning at home together.

The second manuscript, "Building on Existing Brick-and-Mortar Practices in Online Spaces," focused on how the knowledge and expertise developed by educators in brick-and-mortar classrooms can be useful in online teaching environments.

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Assistant Professor of Marketing Dan Li co-authored an article, titled "The role of psychological ownership in consumer happiness," in the Journal of Consumer Marketing. The article, published on June 10, showed that consumers feel happier when they have a higher psychological ownership over an item after consumption. Furthermore, consumers anticipate greater happiness from a product before consumption due to increased psychological ownership through customization.

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Project Pericles announced that Assistant Teaching Professor of English Jayne Thompson was selected for the second cohort of faculty members for the Mellon Periclean Faculty Leadership Program in the Humanities. As a Periclean Faculty Leader, she joins a community of scholars, including Associate Professors Marina Barnett and Bretton Alvaré and Assistant Professor Jordan Smith, dedicated to incorporating civic engagement into the curriculum while empowering students to use their academic knowledge to tackle real-world problems.

The $4,000 grant will help with the development of the Fall 2021 Community Literacy and Social Justice course focused on putting writing center theory and pedagogy to work in establishing sustainable writing centers across the community, the first at State Correctional Institution at Chester, and each with the signature feature of collaborative student leadership of writing workshops and the editing and publishing of writing emerging from those workshops.

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Widener University President Julie E. Wollman presented the William David Eckard Jr. Award for Distinguished Service to Mary Ellen Ferkler, an academic secretary in the School of Human Service Profession’s Center of Social Work Education, and Martin “Marty” Schultz, a support scientist in the Science Division of the College of Arts & Sciences. This annual award was established by William David Eckard III, former long-time vice president of administration and finance at Widener and a 1966 graduate of Pennsylvania Military College, in memory of his father.

Ferkler has provided outstanding service to Widener students and employees since she arrived on campus in 2008. Schultz, who has worked full time at Widener since 1987, is known for being a large part of why Widener’s science programs offer a rich educational experience to students.

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Darrell Spurlock, Jr., professor and director of the Leadership Center for Nursing Education Research, published an article in the Journal of Nursing Education. The article outlined the looming challenges caused by COVID-19 in how nurse researchers, who rely significantly on physical interaction to reach findings, continue to generate knowledge in the midst of temporary yet extended circumstances of social distancing.

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Dawn Gulick, professor of graduate physical therapy, was awarded $50,000 in equity investment from Ben Franklin Technology Partners to advance the development of her invention, The Mobil-Aider. FDA-approved and patent-pending, The Mobil-Aider was developed by Professor Gulick to quantify joint mobility in musculoskeletal injuries. This most recent investment is in addition to two grants, Phase I and Phase II, awarded to Professor Gulick from the National Science Foundation. 

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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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Kayla Van Osten, affiliate librarian and assistant archivist, published an article in the Pennsylvania Library Association's College and Research Division blog. In the post, Van Osten explored her role as an instruction librarian and examined "How does an instruction librarian without any instruction training teach an engaging information literacy lesson?" The article explains the inspiration behind the Mystery at the Library freshmen orientation event from August 2019 and how she used this to create a digital scavenger hunt in Canvas that will hopefully be used in future instructional classes.  

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Assistant Librarian Susan Tsiouris led a presentation on "Mindfulness at Your Library: How to De-stress During Finals" at Healthy Habits, a national online conference designed to cultivate a culture of health and wellness in libraries and communities. The presentation detailed Tsiouris's work to organize mindfulness sessions for students as well as other de-stressing events during finals. The project's mission was to teach students about mindfulness, how to engage during stressful periods, and ways to reduce stress.

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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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