Faculty Highlights: Recent Awards and Grants

Faculty Highlights: Recent Awards and Grants

• Boosting the Breadth of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center Research Consortium
• Dragons on Fire: Kudos for Student Achievements: Summer 2024
• Looking for Clues About Your Real Age? Your Grandparents' Education May Offer Some Insight.
• Seeing the Potential for Drexel-Salus Collaborations

Last term, Drexel University faculty members were recognized for their scholarly research and prolific academic and professional contributions. This update offers a snapshot of activity courtesy of the Office of the Provost.

Sponsored Research

Jonathan Deutsch, PhD, professor and director of the Drexel Food Lab in the College of Nursing and Health Professions, received four industry-sponsored contracts for a combined award amount of $52,375 from Aramark, F&S Fresh Foods, La Colombe and Mixtape Kitchens, LLC, to perform varied food product design and culinary innovation projects.

Jessica Chou, PhD, assistant professor of counseling and family therapy in the College of Nursing and Health Professions, was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Safety and Justice Challenge Winter 2023-2024 Criminal Justice Microgrant Fund through the City of Philadelphia Office for Criminal Justice. Through Drexel's Caring Together Program, Chou and her team will conduct a one-year, family-centered needs assessment for incarcerated women with substanceuse disorders (SUDs) and their families to identify reentry gaps in support focused on gender-specific needs for women with SUDs reentering the community, as well as the needs to the family as they provide reentry support.

Joshua Lequieu, PhD, assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering in the College of Engineering, has been awarded a NSF Faculty Early Career Development grant in support of his project "Chemically specific polymer models with field-theoretic simulations."

Edward Hartsough, PhD, associate professor of pharmacology and physiology in the College of Medicine, received a one-year, $476,587 grant from the National Institutes of Health for his project "Exploiting Oxidative Stress Response in Uveal Melanoma Liver Metastases."

Kazuhito Toyooka, PhD, an associate professor of neurobiology and anatomy in the College of Medicine, received a one-year, $227,250 grant from the National Institutes of Health for his project "Targeting the Pigment Epithelium-Derived Factor Signaling Pathway in Neurodevelopmental Disorders."

Amy Carroll-Scott, PhD, associate professor and chair of community health and prevention in the Dana and David Dornsife School of Public Health, was awarded $400,000 by the Barra Foundation to build capacity and sustainability of a community system of research oversight. Researchers are partnering with the Community Research Review Board in the West Philadelphia Promise Zone Community to transform how traditional Institutional Review Boards review and approve their studies. This community-engaged approach to research will better ensure that researchers recruit residents and collect data to address the social determinants of health in the Promise Zone in the most trustful, community-engaged, ethical, culturally salient and scientifically rigorous way.

The Philadelphia Department of Public Health awarded $399,184 to Dornsife School of Public Health researchers to lead a mixed methods evaluation of Philly Joy Bank, a guaranteed income pilot program that will support pregnant Philadelphians. Allison Groves, PhD, associate professor of community health and prevention, and Elizabeth Salerno Valdez, PhD, assistant professor of community health and prevention, are co-principal investigators.

Christopher Wright, PhD, associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion and associate professor in the School of Education, received a grant from the National Science Foundation to support his project titled "Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Approaches to Science Classroom Assessment: A Workshop." The workshop will bring together scholars in the emerging areas of culturally relevant and sustaining approaches to science classroom assessment.

Ayana Allen-Handy, PhD, department chair for policy organization and leadership and associate professor in the School of Education, received a five-year grant from the University of North Carolina to support her research project titled "Racism Resilience Among Black Autistic Children and Caregivers."

Daniel Coslett, assistant professor of architecture in the Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design, received a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society for archival research on French-colonial churches in North Africa, to be conducted later this year in Rome.

Valerie Ifill, assistant professor of dance, and Raja Schaar, associate professor of product design, both in the Westphal College of Media Arts & Design; Michelle Rogers, PhD, associate professor and director of the Women in Tech Initiative in the College of Computing & Informatics; and Ayana Allen-Handy, PhD, department chair for policy organization and leadership and associate professor in the School of Education, are co-principal investigators on "STEAMing through Dance: A Multimodal Exploration of Black Girls' Intersectional Identities and STEAM Literacies within a Transdisciplinary STEAM Counterspace." The project was recently awarded a grant of $341,606 by the Spencer Foundation.

Kari Lenhart, PhD, assistant professor of biology, in the College of Arts and Sciences, was awarded $1,988,276 over four years from the Hevolution Foundation for the project "Investigating age-related decline in de-differentiation and effects on germline stem cell loss and tissue degeneration."

Major Gifts, Honors and Recognition

Elizabeth Polcha, PhD, assistant professor of English and digital humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences, was awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for the project "Venus in Transit: Gendered Violence and the Production of Natural History.

David E. Breen, PhD, professor and associate department head of graduate affairs in computer science in the College of Computing & Informatics, received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program award in computer science for the 2024-25 academic year from the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. As a Fulbright scholar, Breen will research at the Inria Centre at the University of Grenoble Alpes in Grenoble, France during the 2024-25 academic year. He will join the Elan (modELing the Appearance of Nonlinear phenomena) team to work on a project titled "Simulation of Meso-scale, Self-folding Behavior of Knitted Fabrics." The project will develop computational methods for predicting the intricate, small-scale geometric structures that emerge in knitted fabrics via the interplay of forces between its various stitches.

Kristal Brown, PhD, assistant professor of creative arts therapies in the College of Nursing and Health Professions, was accepted as a 2024 COURAGE program scholar. The program accepts 20 underrepresented researchers yearly whose focus area is nutrition, obesity or diabetes. As part of the longitudinal career advancement program funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health, scholars receive multilevel mentorship and participate in a longitudinal program of three-plus years.

Yury Gogotsi, PhD, Distinguished University and Charles T. and Ruth M. Bach Professor in the department of materials science and engineering in the College of Engineering, has been elected to the Academy of Europe. The Academy seeks the advancement and propagation of excellence in scholarship anywhere in the world for the public benefit and for the advancement of the education of the public of all ages in Europe. Membership of the Academy is by invitation only and follows a rigorous peer review selection process by each relevant section.

Abieyuwa Aghayere, PhD professor of civil, architectural and environmental engineering in the College of Engineering, was named a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers. This prestigious recognition is granted to only three percent of ASCE members who have made celebrated contributions and developed creative solutions that change lives around the world.

Charles Cairns, MD, the Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Dean of the College of Medicine, was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Kara Spiller, PhD, URBN Professor of Biomedical Innovation in the School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems, was elected to the 2024 Class of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering College of Fellows.

Lin Han, PhD, professor in the School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems, was elected to the 2024 Class of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering College of Fellows.