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

Recent presentations, awards and publications include the following:

Presentations

Sean O’Neill, policy scientist at UD’s Institute for Public Administration (IPA), traveled throughout the state to congratulate the 2023 recipients of the Local Government Training Program certificates in Local Government Leadership and Planning Education. IPA, a research and public service center in the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration, annually offers training to public officials and municipal staff. This training covers topics such as municipal planning, zoning, legal issues, economic development, and sustainability. Participants receive credit toward the Delaware Certificate in Local Government Leadership or the Delaware Certificate in Planning Education. Recipients of the certificate span municipalities across Delaware, including the towns of Millville, Georgetown, Milton and Camden, and the cities of Milford and Dover.

Ari August, a 2021 graduate from the College of Arts and Sciences and the Honors College, presented her senior thesis research project at the International Meeting on Simulation in Healthcare (IMSH) in San Diego, California, as well as a research symposium at the Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University. Her research, titled “Credits Where They’re Due: A Qualitative Study of Motivation in a Novel Standardized Patient Program,” analyzes the impact of appropriate compensation for Standardized Patients (SPs) and how this influences the success of SP programs by strengthening motivation, professionalism, and performance quality. The results highlighted UD's Healthcare Theatre program's provision of university course credits to its SPs through a structured curriculum which not only provides necessary communication skills for a successful career, but also accelerates their professional progress. This structure of SP compensation has been successful in creating highly motivated SPs who strive for excellence and contributes to a reduction in issues of SP professionalism that threaten the stability of SP programs. 

Awards 

Margaret LaFashia, a College of Health Sciences alumna, has been included in Women We Admire’s Top 50 Women Leaders of Delaware for 2024. Seeking a career change, LaFashia graduated from UD’s School of Nursing in 2015. She now works as director of workforce partnership development for Nemours Children’s Health, where she leads efforts to diversify workforce pipelines in nursing. “This recognition is about my work; it’s vital work, and I hope it continues gaining traction,” LaFashia said. “I may not see the trend shift in my lifetime, but I’m hopeful we'll see a positive trend shift through the work we do at Nemours and the work of my alma mater.” 

Diane Vizthum, a nutrition science doctoral candidate, has been awarded the Emerging Researcher Grant from the Commission on Dietetic Registration through the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Foundation. The $10,000 award will support her dissertation on time restricted eating, a form of intermittent fasting, and its impacts on body composition, diet quality, and eating behavior in young women. Vizthum works closely with Carly Pacanowski, associate professor of health behavior and nutrition sciences in the College of Health Sciences. Together, they wrote a mixed-methods systematic review on time restricted eating that was published in April 2023 in the journal Appetite. 

Emmalea Ernest, UD Cooperative Extension fruit and vegetable specialist, received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Bean Improvement Cooperative, an organization focused on the exchange of information and materials for the improvement of bean production worldwide. The award acknowledges scientists with fewer than 15 years of post-graduate service who demonstrate outstanding contributions to bean research and/or education.

On Jan. 24, UD’s Center for Economic Education and Entrepreneurship in the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics honored the winners of three grade categories in the fall 2023 edition of the Stock Market Game, an educational simulation for Delaware schools put on twice a year. The Stock Market Game is a national competition put on by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA). The game was sponsored by SIFMA and funded by the Delaware Department of Justice’s Investor Protection Unit with support from WSFS Bank.

The winners were the top finishers in a field of 1,384 students on 351 teams. Seventy teams outperformed S&P 500 growth with their trades, and 56 of those managed to grow their investments by $10,000 or more. Overall, 35 schools participated in this past round. The winners in the three categories were:

High School Division

• Salesianum High School: Tim Kinkade, Christian Boccuti, Nate Reid and Deron Tchuente

Middle School Division

• Newark Charter Junior High: Calvin Orozco, Aanya Patel and Sofia Rossetta-Angeli

Grade 4-5 Division

•  West Park Place Elementary: Yousef Farag and Carlos Lopez

CEEE coordinates the game in Delaware, along with a companion competition called Investwrite in which students research and write essays about the stock market. In the simulation, students get $100,000 in fictional money to invest in publicly traded companies. They research investment options and can follow the market’s ups and downs and invest in real time, while also keeping track of how they’re performing against other teams. After 10 weeks, those with the best returns in each age group are the winners.

Read more on the Lerner website.

Publications

Daniel M. Green, associate professor of political science and international relations, has published a chapter titled “The United States inside ‘British International Society,’ 1838-1860: Imperial Rivalries and Compatibilities.” This appears in Nineteenth Century America in the Society of States, edited by Cornelia Navari and Yannis Stivachtis.

Nigel Caplan, professor and MA TESL Program Coordinator at the English Language Institute, recently published an op-ed column in TESOL Connections, which details his argument against the intrusion of generative “AI” in the field of Teaching English as a Second Language.

An article by Amara Galileo, a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science and International Relations, was recently published in the Mail and Guardian, South Africa’s premier weekly newspaper. The piece discussed actions by Senegal’s president Macky Sall which seemed to reverse his commitment to democracy for the West African nation. His stance is particularly important in the wake of coups in regional countries of Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso. Galileo’s dissertation explores the extent of democratic erosion in South Africa and Ghana.

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