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

Recent publications, presentations and honors include the following:

Publications

Margaret D. Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and professor of humanities, who on Oct. 8, 2025, delivered the annual faculty lecture ("Picture Books: How We Learn to Value Print and Love Libraries") sponsored by the Friends of the University of Delaware Library, is the author of a newly published essay: "Aubrey Beardsley: The Illustrator Who Would Not Illustrate," in Icons of the Fantastic: Illustrations of Imaginative Literature from The Korshak Collection, eds. Amanda T. Zehnder and David M. Brinley. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2025.

Xiao Fang, professor of management information systems, JPMorgan Chase Senior Faculty Fellow of the Institute for Financial Services Analytics, at UD’s Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics recently had multiple coauthored papers accepted for publication by top journals in information systems, computing and operations. Below is a summary:

• “Latent Similarity‑Enhanced Credit Risk Prediction”, accepted by MIS Quarterly. This study proposes a model combining individual data attributes with latent network similarity to improve credit risk forecasts.
  

• “Data Valuation for Vertical Federated Learning: A Model‑free and Privacy‑preserving Method”, accepted by MIS Quarterly. The paper introduces a novel data valuation metric (MShapley‑CMI) that can assess each party’s contribution in vertically partitioned federated learning while preserving data privacy.
  

• “Care for the Mind Amid Chronic Diseases: An Interpretable AI Approach Using IoT”, accepted by Management Science. The work presents an interpretable AI framework using Internet of Things data to detect and respond to mental health patterns in patients living with chronic disease.
  

• “Responsible AI‑Enabled Infodemic Management: A Hypergraph‑based Infodemic Topic Prediction Framework”, accepted by INFORMS Journal on Computing. This research develops a hypergraph-based method to model and forecast the spread of misinformation during infodemics.
  

• “Demands Satiated or Not? A Psychology‑Informed Deep Probabilistic Approach to Offline Store Recommendations” accepted by INFORMS Journal on Computing. The paper blends behavioral psychology insights with deep probabilistic modeling to enhance offline retail recommendation systems and understand consumer demand saturation.

Presentations

Blažo Kovačević, associate professor in the Department of Art and Design, presented LEGO Immigration Series: Building Empathy Through Play at York University (Toronto, Canada) the Universities Art Association of Canada’s 2025 conference for panel “Bordering Practices: Aesthetic Gestures Across Land, Body, and Digital Space.” 

On Oct. 10, 2025, Scott Abbott, assistant director at the Delaware Center for Civics Education (DCCE) at UD’s Institute for Public Administration (IPA), presented in two sessions for Delaware's statewide professional development day for educators. In the first session, Abbott presented with Michael Feldman, social studies education associate from the Delaware Department of Education, on Building Readers Through Social Studies. This multi-part session highlighted the intersection of social studies and the science of reading, showing how content-rich instruction can strengthen literacy outcomes by supporting comprehension, inference-making and vocabulary development. Participants explored how disciplinary literacy, as taught through social studies, can be a powerful driver of overall literacy by instructing students on how to read like historians, geographers, economists and civic thinkers. In the second session, Abbott presented with Erin Sullivan, social studies teacher at Cab Calloway School of the Arts, a session called Revolution Revisited: Using LOC Primary Sources to Teach the Declaration’s Legacy. This session helped participants explore a collection of newly designed civics and history lessons commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a project funded by a grant from the Library of Congress to the Delaware Center for Civics Education. The Institute for Public Administration is a research and public service center in the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration.

Rena Hallam, interim dean of the College of Education and Human Development (CEHD) and professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences, participated in the Hunt Institute Mayor Fellows program on Oct. 23–24, 2025, in Fort Worth, Texas. As part of the institute’s session on “City Solutions for Early Learning: Expanding Access and Equity in Early Care,” she gave a presentation about how mayors could strengthen child care systems in their communities. Hallam’s research focuses on strategies for improving the quality of both center-based and family child care environments with an emphasis on the design and implementation of state systems and policies.

Exhibitions

Blažo Kovačević, associate professor in the Department of Art and Design, has two pieces on display at the Delaware Contemporary’s 2025 Biennial: Art + AI. Every two years, the Delaware Contemporary dedicates its full gallery footprint to a single theme or medium. For 2025, this biennial explores machine intelligence in seven exhibitions that bring together 11 groundbreaking artists working at the intersection of code, culture and computation. Kovačević’s work appears in “Reclaim / Reframe: Datasets and Cultural Visibility,” which features artists constructing layered narratives that reclaim overlooked and marginalized histories through AI and computational technologies. The Art + AI Biennial features immersive installations and interactive interfaces with work that investigates how artificial intelligence encodes culture and recasts the terms of authorship, labor and truth. On view through Dec. 28, 2025.

Honors

Alaina Robinson, assistant policy scientist at the University of Delaware’s Institute for Public Administration (IPA), was inducted into the Delaware Business Times 40 Under 40 (DBT40) Class of 2025 on Sept. 24 at The Waterfall, in Claymont, Delaware. The DBT40 honors leaders and rising stars who are making a name for themselves by leveraging their innovative ideas, business prowess and community engagement to elevate Delaware’s business community. At IPA, Robinson works as a lead staff liaison for the Redding Consortium for Educational Equity, where she facilitates stakeholder meetings with school leaders, elected officials and state agency partners. Robinson is recognized for her work on impactful education policy research and public service projects across IPA, providing expert project management, research analysis and administrative support for the Redding Consortium. She also coauthors annual reports, composes policy briefs and develops research one-pagers for the consortium. In addition to her public service, she supervises and mentors the next generation of public servants through the Public Administration Fellows program. Read Robinson's full award recognition on the DBT website. The Institute for Public Administration is a research and public service center in the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration.

The University of Delaware’s Center for Economic Education and Entrepreneurship (CEEE) at the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics has received the Albert Beekhuis Award from the Council for Economic Education (CEE), a national honor recognizing excellence in economic and financial education. The award, presented at the CEE’s 64th annual Financial Literacy and Economic Education Conference, is given annually to one affiliated Center for Economic Education within the CEE network for outstanding performance in working with teachers and delivering high-quality community outreach. Made possible through a gift from the Albert Beekhuis Foundation, the award includes a $1,000 honorarium and honors the late Dr. Albert Beekhuis, a lifelong advocate for economic literacy. CEEE’s Scott Bacon and Amy Krzyzanowski, along with Kylee Holliday, a Red Clay Consolidated School District teacher and graduate of UD’s Master of Arts in economic education and entrepreneurship program, accepted the award on behalf of the center.

McKenna Halverson, EHD25PhD, received the 2025 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award from UD’s Graduate College. Advised by Professor Allison Karpyn, Halverson graduated from the Ph.D. in human development and family sciences program in CEHD’s Department of Human Development and Family Sciences. The title of her dissertation is “Perceptions and experiences of food insecurity-related stigma in the United States.”

Media Mention

Parag Mahajan, assistant professor of economics at the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics, was recently cited in an Oct. 3, 2025, article in The New York Times exploring the H-1B visa lottery and its impact on the U.S. tech workforce. The article references Mahajan’s coauthored working paper, “Who Wins the H-1B Lottery? The Effects of Random Allocation of High-Skill Temporary Work Visas,” which analyzes Census data to study how the H-1B lottery shapes immigrant labor market outcomes. The paper offers timely insights into the economic consequences of visa allocation policies and their implications for both workers and employers.

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