Noteworthy

Professor Bruce W. Grant received the Faculty Award for Civic Engagement at the 2020 Faculty Awards event. The honor recognizes sustained outstanding contributions to Widener’s civic engagement mission through his teaching and research. Grant has developed service-learning projects working closely with community partners, including Stetser Elementary School, the Chester Upland School District, CitiTeam Ministries and the Ruth Bennett Community Farm. For the past three years, he, along with Widener faculty and student collaborators, have been developing place-based school garden curriculum at Stetser Elementary School to improve Stetser student academic performance in science, and promote positive motivational dispositions and social engagement in their school communities. Grant has taught academic service learning enhanced courses more than 20 times and has engaged hundreds of Widener students in course-based projects in science education in local Chester schools and community agencies that involve meaningful work for sustainable community development. 

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Virginia Brabender, professor of clinical psychology, received the Distinguished Service and Contribution to Personality Assessment Award from the Society for Personality Assessment (SPA), the largest association dedicated to the development of methods for personality assessment through research, innovation in the theory and practice of assessment, and the promotion of personality assessment practice. The esteemed award celebrates Brabender’s record of meaningful scholarship, tireless advocacy, and hands-on instruction related to personality assessment.

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Beth Barol, associate professor of social work, was chosen for the Earl L. Loschen Award for Clinical Practice from the National Association of Dual Diagnosis (NADD), an international association for persons with intellectual disabilities and mental health needs. Given annually, this prestigious award recognizes Barol for her tremendous impact on the lives of individuals with intellectual and development disabilities as well as mental health needs through her clinical practice.

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Dr. Brooke Wells, an associate professor and program director of Widener’s Human Sexuality Studies PhD, was recently awarded more than $41,000 as a co-investigator on a three-year project funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism of the National Institutes of Health.* 

The research, titled “The development and validation of a novel paradigm for assessing sexual assault risk perception in MSM (men who have sex with men),” is being led by investigators at Rowan University who were granted a total award of $425,541, alongside collaborators from Central Connecticut State University. 

The research project will address the significant problem of sexual violence for sexual minorities, especially men who have sex with men, and will serve as a useful step in creating tools to enhance prevention efforts in this susceptible population. Wells will lend her expertise in HIV and sexual assault research areas, as well as provide input and logistical support in recruitment and assessment in diverse populations of men who have sex with men.  

*Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse And Alcoholism of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R15AA028637. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. 

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Marc D. Weiner, previously employed as executive director of undergraduate programs, was just appointed to associate dean of academic administration for the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. Along with these positions, Weiner is an associate research professor at Rutgers.

Aside from his work in college settings, Weiner is police instructor for Chester County Public Safety Training Center and has served as a board member for the South-East Pennsylvania Terrorism Task Force since 2012. 

Marc D. Weiner graduated with the class of 1986 with a BS in management. 

Claudia Guerrazzi Young, assistant professor of management, published findings in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Medical Informatics entitled "Inter-organizational information sharing and Bundled Payment Reimbursement: Do Hospitals in the U.S. Use Health Information Exchange to Collaborate?" 

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Michael Rosko, professor emeritus of health care management, published an article in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Health Economics and Management  examining the relationship between hospital profitability and efficiency.

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Anne Krouse, dean of the School of Nursing, was re-elected as treasurer to the National League for Nursing's (NLN) Board of Governors. This is Krouses' second term serving as treasurer for the organization. The NLN is one of the leading nursing organizations guided by a mission to promote nurse excellence in nursing education.

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Several faculty in the School of Business Administration, including Associate Professor Kerri Crowne Brannen, Assistant Professor Danielle Durant, Assistant Professor Yamuna Baburaj, Professor Donna McCloskey, and Assistant Dean Lou Anne Vike, as well as Peter Hornberger and Maureen Brown, co-authored an article in the November 2020 issue of the International Journal of Management Education. The article, titled "A program for embedding career activities in multiple core business courses," details a Widener program for embedding career-preparedness into the undergraduate business curriculum.

The program ensures every student in the School of Business Administration is provided with adequate career-preparedness training, and the school is well-positioned to achieve high job placement rates.

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Dr. Yamuna Baburaj, assistant professor of management, recently co-authored two published articles. The article, titled "How to best utilize star employees," was published in the April-June 2020 issue of Organizational Dynamics. The paper discusses some of the challenges associated with star employee management and proposes strategies for managing this form of specialized human capital in any organization.

Another article, titled "Complementary Product Categorization and its Influence on the Make, Buy, and Ally Decision: An Exploratory Study," was accepted in March 2020 and published in the International Journal of Innovation Management. The paper examines the significance of a categorization of product complementarity on the firm governance decision.

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Dr. Brian Larson, professor and department head of management, and Dr. Yamuna Baburaj, assistant professor of management, co-authored an article in the May 2020 issue of the Journal of International Business Disciplines. The article, titled "Alternative Multi-mode International Learning: A Model Establishing Collaboration," proposes a set of activities to enhance cross-cultural learning opportunities as a viable alternative to study abroad.

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Dr. Katia Ciampa, an assistant professor in the Center for Education, and Dr. Zora Wolfe, an associate professor in the Center for Education, published a peer-reviewed article in "Teaching in Higher Education" in September 2020. The article, titled "From isolation to collaboration: creating an intentional community of practice within the doctoral dissertation proposal writing process," was a retrospective case study to examine the implementation of peer-review practices in a doctoral dissertation proposal course.

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Professor Janine Utell, chair of English, has been accepted as a 2020-2021 Public Fellow at the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities. As part of the cohort, she will join a group of faculty, students, and other public scholars from the University of Tulsa for an in-depth exploration of Rage. The fellowship was originally designed to admit public fellows from the Tulsa area, but the shift to digital programming and meeting allowed Utell to join the cohort. She is in the first non-Tulsan to join the group since the Center began.

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Rhonda Hazell, DPM, an adjunct professor of biology at Widener and an assistant professor of biology at La Salle, is the 2020 recipient of La Salle University's Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award. Hazell is the 100th recipient of the award, which recognizes excellence in teaching, inspiration in and out of the classroom, and devotion to helping students realize their potential.

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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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