Faculty, Staff & Student Accomplishments
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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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