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

Recent honors, presentations and publications include the following:

Honors

José-Luis Riera, vice president for student life, and Nicole Long, assistant vice president of student experience and belonging, have been selected for the inaugural class of Aspen Index Impact Fellows, an elite group of 90 professionals and youth. Riera was named a Senior Impact Fellow, and Long was named an Impact Fellow, representing both tiers of the professional system. According to the Aspen Institute, the goal of the fellows is to “advance an urgent agenda focused on research, interventions and strategies necessary to accelerate the access to, and quality of, youth leadership programs nationally. The goal of this initiative is to lift youth exposure to high-quality leadership programs above 50% over the next five years.” Comprised of college presidents, senior leaders, educators and youth from across the country, the Aspen Index Impact Fellows will work together to develop, optimize and beta-test the Aspen Index, a digital assessment tool created to measure leadership capacities with the goal of increasing personal and professional growth using peer-reviewed empirical research for benchmarking across diverse demographic groups and experiences. Founded in 1949, the Aspen Institute is a global nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with a campus in Aspen, Colorado, and an international network of partners.

Jennifer Lambe, associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Communication, has had her Willingness to Censor Scale (WTC) selected for inclusion in the Compendium of Scales and Measures in Communication (COSMIC), organized by the Communication Institute for Online Scholarship.

Trevor A. Dawes, vice provost for libraries and museums and May Morris University Librarian, was elected vice president/president-elect of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) at the association’s annual meeting on Oct. 18, 2022. Dawes, who has served on the Board of Directors of ARL since 2020, will begin his term as vice president in January 2023, and as the 63rd ARL president in January 2024. The Association of Research Libraries is a membership organization of libraries and archives in major public and private universities, federal government agencies and large public institutions in Canada and the U.S. that  advocates on research libraries’ behalf, convenes research and higher education partners, shares intelligence on current issues, and develops the next generation of diverse library leaders. The University of Delaware has been a member of ARL since 1983.

Presentations

On Oct. 12, 2022, Department of Physics and Astronomy graduate students Weipeng Wu, Rahul Nikhar and Xiaolong Li delivered presentations at the 2022 Daicar-Bata Annual Best Paper and Highest GPA Awards. Wu received the Best Paper Award for “Controlling polarization of spintronic THz emitter by remnant magnetization texture.” Nikhar and Li were recognized as runners up for their papers “Reliable crystal structure predictions from first principles” and “Preparing to Discover the Unknown with Rubin LSST: Time Domain,” respectively. Additionally, graduate students Muhammad Hani Zaheer and Joseph Betz were presented the Highest GPA Award. The Best Paper Award included a $3,000 monetary prize, with $750 prizes for the two runners up. The winners of the highest GPA each received a $1,500 prize.

Jennifer Lambe, associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Communication, is presenting her work on a panel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) faculty conference in Los Angeles on Oct. 21-22, 2022. The panel is entitled "Navigating Contested Issues on Campus: Speech, Diversity and Public Safety." Lambe will present about her work with theUniversity of California's National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, exploring how diversity officers in higher education are managing tensions between diversity and free speech.

Julie L. McGee, associate professor of Africana studies and art history, contributed to the dedication ceremony for the David C. Driskell Community Park, held Oct. 8, 2022, in Hyattsville, Maryland, discussing the importance of the eponymous artist and scholar and providing remarks for the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Publications

Earl Smith and Angela Hattery, professors in the Department of Women and Gender Studies, have published a groundbreaking study of life inside solitary confinement, Way Down in the Hole: Race, Intimacy and the Reproduction of Racial Ideologies in Solitary Confinement (Rutgers University Press). The study, released on Oct. 14, 2022, is based on hundreds of hours of observation in solitary confinement units and interviews with both those who are incarcerated and those who work in solitary confinement. Way Down in the Hole uncovers the ways in which specific structures of solitary confinement, including the close and intimate contact between the incarcerated and the correctional officers, serve as a petri dish that fuels the production and reproduction of white racial resentment.

Ken Cohen, associate professor of history and director of Museum Studies and Public Engagement, is the author of a new peer-reviewed essay about the history of a baby cradle that has been erroneously associated with enslaved labor but actually was produced by 19th-century incarcerated labor. The article, "Cradling the Past: Labor and Memory in American Furniture History," is published in American Furniture 29 (2021/22): 1-27. He is also lead editor of the Smithsonian's first catalog of its iconic pop culture collections, which will serve as the catalog for the first major long-term exhibition on the same subject, opening in December. The book, Entertainment Nation: How Music, Television, Film, Sports and Theater Shaped theUnited States (Smithsonian Books), is co-edited with John W. Troutman and features a foreword by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, along with essays by Billie Jean King, John Legend, Jill Lepore, Aasif Mandvi and others.

Emiy Pfender, doctoral student in the Department of Communication, and Scott Caplan, professor of communication, are authors of “Nonverbal immediacy cues and impression formation in video therapy,” published in Counselling Psychology Quarterly. The increased use of video-mediated communication (VMC) due to the COVID-19 pandemic has led to widespread acceptance of mediated healthcare appointments. Mental health care is one area in which researchers might examine the effects of VMC. This study employed an experiment to test the relative influence of video therapists’ eye contact and gesture on a patient. The results contribute to understanding how nonverbal cues impact health outcomes in VMC.

The Institute for Public  Administration (IPA) has released a policy brief assessing the history and future of the Delaware Population Consortium (DPC). The research was funded by the Delaware Department of Transportation Planning Division to summarize the evolving role of DPC in developing a unified system for statewide population projection. The projections offer essential demographic and economic characteristics of Delaware’s communities. Authored by Julia O’Hanlon and Sean O’Neill, IPA policy scientists,and Lindsay Prickett (MPP ’23), graduate public administration fellow, the brief described how DPC’s population projections and data analysis help frame policy implications and the potential impacts of Delaware’s changing demographic. Policymakers, agency leaders and local stakeholders use population projections and analyses to assess issues impacting residents, including transportation planning, new school construction and services for the increasing older adult population in Delaware. Since its inception in 1975, research and staff support for the DPC has been provided by UD’s Center for Applied Demography and Survey Research. In 2019, the DPC was officially codified into Delaware state law by Gov. John Carney. The policy brief introduced recommendations and questions for state policymakers to consider including state funding for DPC projections, additional partnerships and missing concepts from the DPC framework. In addition, a formal research and staff budgetary structure may help to maintain DPC’s mission to continue offering objective information to the state. Both IPA and CADSR are research centers in the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration. Read the full report on UDSpace.

In a new study, titled "Fiscal federalism and K–12 education funding: Policy lessons from two educational crises," Kenneth Shores, assistant professor in the College of Education and Human Development’s School of Education and the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration, and coauthor Matthew Steinberg of George Mason University analyzed federal fiscal policy during the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic. Shores and Steinberg found that the amount of aid during both crises was inadequate to meet policy goals. For example, the funds distributed to schools were not sufficient in addressing the magnitude of student learning loss during the pandemic. In addition, they found that the mechanisms used to distribute funds were disconnected from policy goals, as school districts with equivalent levels of economic disadvantage received different levels of federal aid. This work was picked up by several news outlets, including Diverse Issues in Higher Education, Forbes, U.S. News and World Report, The Washington Times, USA Today and Education Week.

Researchers from UD’s Center for Community Research and Service (CCRS) and the Institute for Public Administration (IPA) released a report titled “Literacy Through the Lifespan.” Funded by the Delaware Division of Libraries, the report concludes that literacy growth for all ages is dependent upon access to information, family engagement and public investment. Increased literacy helps individuals to become more self-sufficient and to better navigate the world around them. According to the Delaware Department of Education, in 2019, some 15% of children in the state were not prepared for kindergarten as determined by their literacy rate. Contributing factors to child literacy include a child’s direct access to books and libraries and family involvement with cultivating their reading comprehension practice at home. In 2019, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, 20% of Delaware’s adult population had a literacy level that placed them at risk for not being able to use or understand print material. Factors that impact adult literacy range from poverty status, English language proficiency and access to education. CCRS and IPA are research centers in UD’s Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration. Contributors to this research included Janice Barlow, director of KIDS COUNT in Delaware; Erin Nescott, CCRS assistant policy scientist; Rebecca McColl, CCRS assistant policy scientist; and Kelly Sherretz, IPA policy scientist. Read the full report on UDSpace.

New appointments