For the Record provides information about recent professional activities of University of Delaware faculty, staff, students and alumni.

Recent appointments, media, presentations, publications and service include the following:

Appointments

Anshuman Razdan has joined the UD Research Office as associate deputy provost for research development.

“Dr. Razdan will play a critical role in helping us build the University’s interdisciplinary research agenda,” said Charlie Riordan, deputy provost for research and scholarship. “He is a natural born collaborator and has been successful in organizing large proposals in response to major national and international challenges, as well as in creating industry partnerships and consortia. We are delighted to welcome him aboard.”

Razdan will lead the office’s research development unit, leveraging the University’s resources to facilitate research across disciplines to address high-priority challenges. He also will expand relationships with federal and state agencies, industries and foundations that seek and support basic and applied research.

“Major discoveries in the 21st century — that will solve problems and impact society — will come from interdisciplinary research,” Razdan said. “Tackling big problems requires collective and collaborative thinking. It reminds me of a saying we have in India: Individual strengths are like sticks. A single stick can be easily broken, but when you put all of those sticks together, they are much harder to break and can build a bridge.”

Razdan, who is known to colleagues as “AR,” comes to UD from a 20-year career at Arizona State University, where he was a professor of computing, informatics and decision systems engineering and held a number of key administrative posts. Most recently, he served as associate dean for research, corporate and global engagements in the College of Technology and Innovation and director of its Collaboratory, as director of the Advanced Technology Innovation Center, and as director of the Image and 3-D Data Exploitation and Analysis Lab.

He holds two patents on 3-D face authentication and 2-D to 3-D mapping for text documents and has launched two startup companies based on his research. In 2005, he was honored by the Hindustan Times as one of the Top 10 Non-resident Indians Abroad, and in 2006, he was named ASU’s Innovator of the Year.

Visitors to Razdan’s office in 209 Hullihen Hall will see an intriguing object on his bookshelf: a foam bust of George Washington. An expert in 3-D face authentication, Razdan worked with a team at Mount Vernon in 2005 to reconstruct Washington’s face at different stages of his life since no likeness seemed to capture the nation’s first president.

Starting from a “life mask” and other measurements of Washington taken in the 1780s by French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, the team recreated Washington at three stages of his life — at the age of 19, a few years before he became a British Army officer; at 45, when he was general and commander in chief of the Continental Army in the Revolutionary War; and at 57, when he took the oath of office as president. The project, which attracted international media attention, brought together historians, physical anthropologists, computer scientists, artists and designers and demonstrates the collaborative approach Razdan believes in.

“I was attracted to UD because research is recognized as part of the fabric of the institution, critical to the University’s growth and relevance, and the fundamentals here are so strong,” Razdan said. “I am delighted to be here, and I look forward to helping researchers convert their ideas into funded projects. My wing of the Research Office is designed to help provide the scaffolding to faculty, researchers and staff to grow the research enterprise. We are here to serve you.” He can be reached at razdan@udel.edu or 302-831-4717.

Marcia Hutton has been named director of planning and project delivery in Facilities, Real Estate and Auxiliary Services (FREAS). Hutton has been instrumental in the development of the UD campus, serving as project manager for such buildings as the addition to the Bob Carpenter Center; the George Read, Redding, Gilbert, Caesar Rodney and Academy Street residence halls; and the addition to the Carpenter Sports Building. Hutton “brings a wealth of knowledge to the position and the entire FREAS organization is fortunate to have her leadership and experience,” said Peter Krawchyk, interim vice president of Facilities, Real Estate and Auxiliary Services in announcing the appointment.

Media

Carol Henderson, vice provost for diversity, was interviewed in a WHYY First news segment about two Dover, Delaware, women who have written a book about skin tone titled I Love Your Brown.

Presentations

Margaret Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and professor of humanities, was invited by a Washington, D.C.-based non-governmental organization, the Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues (WCCW Inc.), to deliver a lecture as part of a webinar series for graduate students in the U.S. and in South Korea. Her lecture, "Teaching 'Comfort Women' Issues: The Hidden Stories of Girls," focused on the role that child rape and child sex trafficking played in the so-called "comfort system" of World War II, which involved military sex slavery across Asia and which has long been a subject of international controversy over Japan's legal responsibility. Stetz's lecture was broadcast live internationally Aug. 23 and has also been archived by the WCCW as a YouTube video.

Chandra L. Reedy, professor in the School of Public Policy and Administration’s Center for Historic Architecture and Design (CHAD), with additional appointments in art history and Asian studies, recorded a webinar for the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training of the National Park Service (NPS), "Scientific Method and Experimental Design in Preservation and Conservation Research." The webinar is designed to meet the public service mission of both the NPS's National Center for Preservation Technology and Training and UD's CHAD by supporting capacity building in the wider national and international preservation and conservation communities by providing an accessible training resource for students, practicing professionals, volunteers, and others engaged in research to improve methods for preservation of cultural heritage. The presentation was originally made on July 14 in Natchitoches, Louisiana, and the recorded webinar with all handouts has been made permanently available at this website.

Farley Grubb, professor of economics, presented his paper, "Colonial Virginia's Paper Money Regime, 1755-1774: Value Decomposition and Performance," at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Summer Institute Conference on the Development of the American Economy in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on July 12.

In June, Olga Gorbachev, assistant professor of economics, was invited to participate and present her work at the annual MacCaLM (Credit and Labour Market Foundations of the Macroeconomy) conference, "a research project bringing together a group of leading economists to re-examine macroeconomic theory, focusing on how malfunctions in labor and financial markets seem to be at the root of macroeconomic failure." There, Gorbachev was named the first MacCaLM Visiting Fellow at the University of Edinburgh.

Gorbachev's work on credit card debt with co-author Maria Luengo-Prado of the Federal Reserve Bank was also featured on Bankrate.com.

Patricia A. DeLeon, Trustees Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences, presented “Extracellular Vesicles in the Female Reproductive Tract: Sperm Maturation and Function” at the Extracellular Vesicles: Friends and Foes Symposium, Weizmann Institute/Hebrew University, Rehovot, Israel, June 7-9.

Publications

Lauren Wallis, assistant librarian and First Year Experience and Student Success Librarian, Reference and Instructional Services Department, University of Delaware Library, co-authored a book chapter, "The Politics of Information: Students as Creators in a Metaliteracy Context," with Andrew Battista for Metaliteracy in Practice, published by ALA Neal-Schuman, January 2016.

Service

Jaime Margalotti, associate librarian and archival description librarian, Manuscripts and Archives Department, University of Delaware Library, recently served on the planning committee for the 2016 ArchivesSpace Member Forum.  This event took place on Aug. 2 at the Robert W. Woodruff Library at the Atlanta University Center, Atlanta, Georgia. Margalotti additionally chaired the session, "How Does ArchivesSpace Work for You?" where staff from seven different institutions shared ways in which they've enhanced the functionality of the application through locally produced plug-ins. ArchivesSpace is an open source, web application for managing archives information, hosted by LYRASIS. The University of Delaware Library holds a supporting membership to the ArchivesSpace program.

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