Research @ Pace
A newsletter highlighting faculty research & scholarship
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Rebecca Tekula, PhD is the Chair of the Public Administration Department (Dyson College of Arts and Sciences, NYC) and the Executive Director of the Helene and Grant Wilson Center for Social Entrepreneurship (Provost’s Office). With a commitment to community-engaged research, Prof. Tekula and her colleagues have secured funding from a number of foundations and government sources for research and projects that aim to enhance community well-being, address critical public health issues and inspire the next generation of public service leaders.
Their ongoing project with the Westchester County Opioid Response and Overdose Prevention Initiative, in collaboration with the Partnership to End Addiction, the harris project, aims to raise awareness about co-occurring disorders through an innovative preventive health education curriculum. This project seeks to educate youth, parents and teachers about the interconnectedness of mental health and substance use, ultimately reducing health risks and substance abuse.
Professor Tekula is also working on a new undergraduate fellowship program funded by the Teagle Foundation, titled "The City and the Sea: A New York City Fellowship in Civics and Public Service," which will provide immersive educational experiences for students in civics and public service. Additionally, Professor Tekula and Gina Scutelnicu-Todoran, PhD (Public Administration, NYC, Dyson College of Arts and Sciences) are working with COFCCA on an examination of the financial health of child welfare nonprofits in New York State, and will conduct a comprehensive Community Needs Assessment for the Hispanic Advisory Board to the County Executive of Westchester County.
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Philip G. Cohen, JD,LLM (Legal Studies and Taxation, NYC, Lubin School of Business) is a retired Vice President-Tax & General Tax Counsel for Unilever United States, Inc. having worked in the corporate tax function at Unilever for over 26 years including the last 10 ½ years as head of the U.S. based tax department. He practiced corporate tax law for 33 years and was an adjunct professor at Pace University Lubin School of Business for 23 years before joining the full-time faculty in 2012.
Professor Cohen is an active member of the American Bar Association and its Tax Section, the New York State Bar Association and its Tax Section and is now an Associate Member of Tax Executives Institute (TEI) and its NYC Chapter after serving for many years, while functioning as a corporate tax executive, as a member and chair of many of its committees and task forces including having chaired the Federal Tax Committee; Communications Committee; Tax Reform Task Force; Tax Shelter Task Force; and Financial Products Subcommittee. Professor Cohen is the author of numerous op-eds on tax related subjects in addition to his scholarly writings.
His latest published articles, both appear in The Tax Lawyer, a publication of the American Bar Association Section of Taxation in collaboration with Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law are “Blocked Income & 3M Company & Subsidiaries v. Commissioner-Round One- The Chevron Step One Argument” 77.2 (Winter 2024) and “Whirlpool Financial Corp. v. Commissioner Was Properly Decided” 76.3 (Winter 2023).
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Raquel Plotka, PhD (School of Education, NYC) co-authored (with Ruth Guirguis, PhD) “The Effects of COVID-19 on Early Childhood Education: Research and Implications” (Ethics Press).
The COVID-19 pandemic has presented the field of early childhood education with several challenges, including the need to shift early childhood instruction online. The effect of COVID-19 and social distancing regulations were experienced differently by teachers, families, child care providers, teacher educators, and early interventionists. These differences were exacerbated by socio-economic status, cultural backgrounds, and diversity in children's developmental trajectories and disabilities. Theoretical assumptions guiding the early childhood education field propose that learning is an active process fostered by an environment that supports exploration, manipulation, social interactions, and play. These foundations were put to test during the different phases of the pandemic.
These past years have represented a time for readjustment for those attempting to meet the needs of young children in several capacities. This book synthesizes the many lessons learned during the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic and puts forward recommendations for the future of the early childhood education profession in times of rapid and continuous change in the world and in the field.
This book should prove especially helpful for practitioners, educators, families, and policymakers looking for a source that integrates the knowledge gathered in the past unprecedented years. The field of early childhood education will never be the same, and this book attempts to capitalize on the experiences lived during these challenging times.
This publication was supported the Office of Research Book and Performance Completion Award.
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Author bio: Raquel Plotka, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Early Childhood Development, Learning, and Intervention. She has presented her research at national and international conferences, has published multiple journal articles, and is passionate about early childhood research that informs policy and practice.
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Kyomi Gregory-Martin, PhD (MS CSD, NYC, College of Health Professions) has published her first international publication after being the International Keynote speaker for the Speech Pathology Australia Conference in May 2023 in Tasmania, Australia. The article was a follow-up to her keynote address, titled “Utilizing a Cultural Humility Lens: Reflect, Respect, and Respond” in the Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology 25:3 (2023). This article discussed the theme of cultural humility and its significance to clinical practice. It provided practical ways of applying responsiveness to clinical care.
In addition, she published an article titled, "Professionalism in CSD: Consideration of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Access,” that appeared in Perspectives of ASHA Special Interest Group 14 (2024) with fellow members of the Multicultural Issues Board for the American Speech-Language Hearing Association (ASHA). This article provided a detailed discussion of professionalism that reflects cultural responsiveness to the standards of students, practitioners, and faculty.
Professor Gregory-Martin was also invited speaker at the Council for Academic Programs in Communication Sciences and Disorders (CAPCSD) Conference where she presented this April in New Orleans, LA. Her presentation was titled "Policies and Procedures Matter: How to Build and Inclusive Framework." She also presented two seminars at the National Black Association for Speech-Language Hearing (NBASLH) in Raleigh, NC, which was a roundtable discussion "African American English: Considerations for Culturally Responsive Assessment" and a panel for the Cultural Humility Task Force she was a founder of "The Essence of Cultural Humility: The Inaugural Cohort’s Lessons Learned."
Professor Gregory-Martin was also featured on the cover of the January Winter 2024 issue of the publication Resound.
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Intersectionality and Crisis Management: A Path to Social Equity by Hillary Knepper, PhD (MPA, NYC, Dyson College of Arts and Sciences), Michelle Evans (University of Tennessee at Chattanooga , and Tiffany Henley, PhD (MPA, NYC, Dyson College of Arts and Sciences) won the 2024 Section on Democracy and Social Justice (SDSJ) best book award at the annual American Society of Public Administration Conference.
Intersectionality and Crisis Management: A Path to Social Equity aims to embed the social equity discourse into crisis management while exploring the potential of a new tool, the Integrative Crisis Management Model. Leaders and managers navigate a complex and networked environment of policy-making and action, frequently occurring in real time, under constant media exposure. The pervasive availability of this news on all platforms and devices produces a lingering anxiety about the inevitability of danger. Consequently, crisis affords a time-sensitive exploration of management practices and sheds a critical spotlight on deficiencies that may yield novel approaches to doing business.
As the book engages contributing authors who are foremost in their field, it also includes practitioners, students, and junior scholars in a creative new discourse about equity. Bringing these diverse voices together in one volume presents a unique opportunity to generate new insights. Intersectionality provides a framework for understanding how categorizations of people drive social constructs of discrimination and oppression. Each chapter covers a different subject – exploring intersectionality in healthcare, nonprofit management, and human resources – and is accompanied by discussion questions. The book provides something for the classroom, for practitioners, and for scholars who want to include more intersectional thinking into their work.
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Francine Falk-Ross, PhD (School of Education, Pleasantville) published “Multimodal reading and design: Preservice Teachers’ Graphic Narratives for Students” in Language Arts, 101.4 (2024), a journal with wide readership in the Literacy and Education disciplines. In recent years, there has been significant changes in our environment for learning, requiring new approaches to instruction in educational settings/fora. We have moved to an increased use of multimodal communication and new literacies to address accessing information and mediating learning in content area classrooms. In this study, preservice and practicing teachers analyzed and then designed innovative graphic narratives to understand and model the format for curricular inclusion in young adolescents’ learning.
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Tiffany Henley, PhD (Masters of Public Administration, NYC, Dyson College of Arts and Sciences) Kyomi Gregory-Martin, PhD (MS CSD, NYC, College of Health Professions) and Ana B. Amaya, PhD (Health Science, NYC, College of Health Professions) together with their colleague, Una Hopkins, DNP (Montefiore Medical Center) published
“Exploring Interprofessional Education and Collaboration in the Midst of COVID-19” in the Journal of Health and Human Services Administration (2024). This article highlighted the COVID-19 pandemic and the inequities it uncovered. This included the need for a rapid and coordinated response among different disciplines in medical settings. This paper explores the training and education of health care professionals in a primarily minority serving hospital guided by the appreciative inquiry framework.
This publication was funded by Office of Research COVID-19 Collaborative Interdisciplinary Research Award.
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Shamita Dutta Gupta, PhD (Mathematics, NYC, Dyson College of Arts and Sciences) was awarded a grant from the AMC4all of MAA for her project titled “Breaking the mold: the AMC contest is for me!”. The project addresses the acute needs of minority and under-represented students in Mathematics in our local middle and high schools. In this project, the PIs will work with local schools to prepare students for the AMC contests. The AMC are national grade appropriate Math contests. As one trains for them, one carves out a path for themselves of self-improvement in Mathematics. Thus, this project will help community students on a path to success to STEM majors and careers.
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Namchul Shin, PhD (Information Technology, NYC, Seidenberg School of CSIS), co-authored a paper (with Jason Dedrick, PhD, Professor Emeritus in the School of Information Studies and Center of Excellence Fellow at Syracuse University) titled "Smartphones and Environmental Sustainability: A Country-Level Analysis” in Communications of the Association for Information Systems 54 (2024). Research suggests a nonlinear relationship between information and communication technologies (ICTs) and CO2 emissions, resembling an inverted U-shaped curve similar to the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC). Previous studies have used an ICT index but have yet to focus on smartphones, the use of which is associated with the surge in mobile app usage and large information systems to support their use. This study fills that gap by analyzing the impact of ICTs and smartphones on CO2 emissions using country-level data from 2009 to 2017. Our findings show that ICTs follow an inverted U-shaped curve with CO2 emissions, consistent with the EKC hypothesis. The results also show that CO2 emissions rise with increased smartphone capital but decline as smartphone stock increases further. These findings imply that carbon emissions increase with the penetration of ICTs in poorer countries but in wealthier countries, ICT penetration and smartphone stock are related to lower CO2 emissions. The results should not be taken as evidence that ICTs cannot lead to greater sustainability in poorer countries but should be seen as a call for the IS community to help all countries apply existing knowledge and develop new knowledge to use ICTs to reduce emissions in response to the immediate challenge of climate change. | | |
Darren Hayes, PhD (Information Technology, NYC, Seidenberg School of CSIS) recently co-authored a conference paper entitled "Finding Forensic Artefacts in Long-Term Frequency Band Occupancy Measurements Using Statistics and Machine Learning" (April 2024). This publication is part of an e-book, Digital Forensics and Cyber Crime. Wireless real-time communication between users is a key function in many types of businesses. With the emergence of digital systems to exchange data between users of the same spectrum, usage of the wireless spectrum is changing and increasing. Long-term frequency band occupancy measurements, carried out in accordance with the requirements of the International Telecommunication Union, can be used to measure and store informative values for further forensic investigation. In the existing literature, there is very limited research on using that information for a forensic investigation due to a lack of relevant datasets, examination methods and valuable artefacts. In this paper, the authors present a new approach to identify forensically sound deviations, often referred to as outliers, from using a monitored frequency band. They present the medcouple method for statistically detecting and classifying outliers. Furthermore, we created two datasets of long-term frequency band occupancy measurements that were used to evaluate our approach. The authors also evaluated our datasets with different machine learning techniques, which demonstrate that Random Forest has the highest classification accuracy and sensitivity to automatically detect outliers. These datasets will also be made publicly available for further research. | | |
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Miguel Mosteiro, PhD (Computer Science, NYC, Seidenberg School of CSIS), along with Pace students, presented two papers at the NETYS 2024 | The International Conference on NETworked sYStems, Rabat, Morocco, a high-tier and selective conference in Distributed Computing (DC). The program committee includes many scholars top-ranked in DC worldwide.
The first paper, titled “Privacy Preserving Vehicular Adhoc Network Computations: A NYC Taxi Trips Evaluation" is an experimental study of algebraic computations (for instance of sensed values) in vehicular networks. The algorithms tested were studied in previous work theoretically only (the authors received the ICALP 2018 best paper award for that work). One of the most exciting aspects of this experimental study is that it was carried out on data extracted from a massive public database of NYC taxi trips. The paper is co-authored by Pace undergraduate student Austin Powlette and a colleague from the Univ. of Augusta, D. R. Kowalski, PhD. Austin Powlette was funded by the Undergraduate Student-Faculty Research Award.
The second paper, titled "Distributed Station Assignment through Learning,” is an experimental study of a scheduling problem called Station Assignment, where mobile users of a wireless network need to upload data to static base stations, while minimizing energy consumption in various aspects. Specifically, the authors implemented a Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) approach called Independent Proximal Policy Optimization (IPPO) designed by OpenAI (that is, an approach at the forefront of AI research). MARL is particularly challenging because the decisions of each agent have an impact on the decisions of other agents. Nevertheless, the authors have been able to show improved performance with respect to previous approaches to Station Assignment. The paper is coauthored by Pace PhD students Lu Dong and Michelle Wang. This work is an integral part of a larger project to study MARL for DC in collaboration with external international scholars, P. Wong, Univ. Liverpool and A. Liu, Univ. Utrecht. It was partially funded by the Scholarly Research Fund.
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Erna Melanie DuPuis, PhD (Environmental Studies and Sciences, Pleasantville, Dyson College of Arts and Sciences) co-authored an article “Farming with a mission: the case of nonprofit farms,” in Agriculture and Human Values (2024). Organizations interested in food alterity, security, and justice are often governed as 501(c)(3) nonprofits. As such, they are required to fulfill missions beyond profit maximization. This study focuses on the role of nonprofits in the agrifood system. Looking at nonprofit farms as both farms and as nonprofits, we seek to understand whether nonprofit organizations, as an alternative mode of governance, creates the possibility of an alternative economic practice, set apart from the conventional food system. The authors constructed a national database of nonprofit farms and the characteristics of the counties in which they are located. The authors’ findings indicate that nonprofit farms tend not to be in the places with the most need of the services provided, which we argue is due to the structure of nonprofit governance, namely that nonprofits, while not profit-maximizing, are dependent on external resources, particularly donations. While they do operate as an alternative economic practice, their nonprofit mode of governance renders them unable to repair the failures of the current food system. Nevertheless, these farms do contribute to their local communities, both in terms of meeting their mission and as members of a broader local food system infrastructure. This is true whether or not these farms specifically state that food system transformation is part of their mission.
Professor DuPuis was quoted in the Atlantic article “Milk Has Lost Its Magic: The bird-flu panic is getting out of hand.” She provided historical information on the rise and fall of milk consumption in the United States.
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| Amanda Flynn, MM, CAS (Sands College of Performing Arts) published “Understanding Performers’ Perspectives on Access to Care and Support for Voice Injuries: A Survey Study” in the Journal of Voice (May 2024). Previous studies show that performers face higher risk of voice injury and experience greater impairment compared to nonperformers. Understanding the factors influencing support for performers is important for improving outcomes. An anonymous online survey was completed by 151 performers with self-reported history of voice injury. Participants commonly sought help from a general otolaryngologist, laryngologist, or voice teacher and treatments included voice therapy, rest, medication, and surgery, with a majority reporting high treatment adherence. Those with partial or nonadherence cited financial/insurance barriers, scheduling/availability conflicts, or treatment dissatisfaction. Participants reported high awareness of voice injury “red flags”, and moderate access to voice care tools/resources and a voice team, but low support from management/production teams. Several expressed a desire for better education about preventive care. Comfort levels in discussing voice injuries varied across social contexts, but those working with voice teachers were more comfortable discussing their voice problems with colleagues and peers. This study explores performers' perspectives on accessing care for voice injuries and emphasizes the importance of increased preventive education to address the ongoing stigma surrounding voice injuries and to foster a supportive environment for performers seeking help. Additionally, the study highlights the role of voice professionals in both providing and advocating for support systems for performers with voice injury. | |
Kristen di Gennaro, PhD (English, NYC, Dyson College of Arts and Sciences) presented a paper, “’Learning about written language’: A curricular approach integrating ‘writing about writing’ and critical language awareness,” with colleague Meaghan Brewer, PhD (English, NYC, Dyson College of Arts and Sciences) as part of an invited colloquium for the American Association for Applied Linguistics annual conference in Houston, Texas. Professor di Gennaro also presented a poster, “African American, Person of Color, BIPOC: The extent to which (white) people avoid saying ‘Black,’” co-authored with graduating senior Felicity Flores (English), and a paper, “Invitation or spamvitation? Analyzing emails from legitimate and predatory publishers.”
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The Department of Economics at Pace University is hosting a one-day conference on “Women’s Health and Labor Outcomes” on Friday, June 7th, 2024. The goal of this conference is to connect (mostly) local scholars working in similar policy areas. To these ends, there will be five speakers and a panel session on policy changes and proposals impacting women. In addition, there will be two speakers associated with the National Bureau of Economic Research and another with the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). Topics will cover a broad range of high impact studies – for example, the impact of the Dobbs ruling on fertility. A panel session led by Faculty across Pace University departments is also being planned.
Registration is free and comes with a complimentary breakfast and lunch. PhD students and all Pace students are welcome to attend.
Details about the conference and registration are in attached flyer.
Please register for the conference here.
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Prestigious Awards and Fellowships | |
As you think back on this semester, please consider referring your high-achieving students to the Office of Prestigious Awards and Fellowships.
Some major awards such as Fulbright, Marshall, and Rangel, all of which provide seniors and recent alums opportunities for after graduation have September deadlines. The Fulbright program offers students the opportunity to earn a graduate degree or to conduct an independent research or creative project abroad. Our campus deadline for Fulbright is September 5th. You and your students can view a recording of a general program overview here, and a recording of Pace-specific information is available here. The Marshal scholarship is funded by the British government in recognition of the aid the United States provided under the Marshall plan after World War II. It fully funds a graduate degree anywhere in the UK for U.S. citizens in any field who are interested in fostering mutual understanding between the people of the U.S. and the UK. The Rangel scholarship fully funds a two-year Masters degree for those interested in careers in the U.S. Foreign Service.
It is crucial for students to spend time over the summer preparing their applications for these and other prestigious awards. In addition, Summer is an excellent time for students earlier in their careers to reflect on their goals and to identify fellowships that could help them achieve them. Students are welcome and encouraged to contact Moira Egan, PhD, Director of Prestigious Awards and Fellowships, at megan@pace.edu with any fellowships-related inquiries.
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Research@Pace will be back in August. We wish you a pleasant and relaxing summer!
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