Bike south along the Link Trail, take a Transpo bus along Route 7, or drive a block past Rocco’s restaurant on South Bend Avenue, and you’ll find a building that’s more than bricks and siding. It’s the region’s newest mental health ally.

When it opens this June, the Wilma and Peter Veldman Family Psychology Clinic will expand local access to mental healthcare through a combination of research, training, and service. The clinic will significantly expand the evidence-based mental health services that Notre Dame provides to the community, while also serving as the new home of the William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families and the newly launched Human Neuroimaging Center.

With three levels and 35,000 square feet of therapy rooms, labs, childcare spaces, and more, the Veldman Clinic is a grand undertaking that, through the thought and passion put into its design, feels less like a facility and more like a home.

“On campus, we tend toward these very formal buildings that are beautiful, but what we needed is a beautiful fit for the community, where people can feel comfortable,” said Jennifer Burke Lefever, the clinic’s managing director.
The clinic’s goal is to meet people where they are, and that starts before they even enter the building. Its position in the East Bank neighborhood makes the clinic a gateway to downtown South Bend, easily reached by bike, foot, bus, or car.

After passing through an accessible entrance, community members are welcomed into a lobby filled with natural light and comfy furniture. On the two-story entrance wall, there’s a large array of butterflies made from hand-painted silk scarves, designed by women at the St. Margaret’s House day center. The butterflies represent transformation, and the artwork’s curve mimics that of the St. Joseph River, as seen in the South Bend flag and the Veldman Clinic’s logo.

Beyond the lobby, design choices both distinct and subtle aim to reduce stress. Artwork across from the elevators uses patterns invoking the art of kintsugi, a Japanese pottery practice of repairing cracks with gold — a reminder that healing can create something stronger and more beautiful than before. A wall in the children’s room is covered with a nature scene made from soft felt. Wide hallways with tall ceilings reduce feelings of claustrophobia, with windows at the end of every corridor aiding visual orientation. And everything from furniture to drinking fountains was selected with wheelchair users in mind.

The clinic’s design also incorporates innovative technologies being introduced to the University for the first time. The Human Neuroimaging Center — led by Aron Barbey, the Andrew J. McKenna Family Professor of Psychology — will house an MRI machine capable of producing structural, functional, and metabolic brain imaging, driving ambitious neuroscience research. The building’s 40 therapy rooms will use a new VALT video system to securely record therapy sessions led by clinical psychology graduate students, so supervisors will be able to review sessions on demand.

“One of our studies will use every floor of the Veldman Clinic,” said Kaylin Hill, an assistant professor of psychology.

Hill’s research focuses on understanding reward and emotion and how they relate to clinical disorders like major depression. She often uses psychophysiological tools, such as an electroencephalogram (EEG), which tracks brain signals through electrodes placed on the scalp. The Veldman Clinic’s EEG setups and interview rooms will help her conduct research outside of her lab in Corbett Family Hall, which is less accessible for the families she works with.

The long-held dream of a psychology clinic finally became a reality through support from leadership at Notre Dame and the College of Arts & Letters, as well as the generosity of multiple Veldman family foundations, including those of Sharon and Matt Edmonds, Connie and Mike Joines, and Anita and Tom Veldman. But Burke Lefever and Kristin Valentino, the clinic’s director and a professor of psychology, knew it wouldn’t be successful without significant input from community partners who have long worked in the area.

Those partners include Oaklawn, a provider of mental health services and addiction treatment; Beacon Community Impact, the public health arm of Beacon Health Systems; and the CASIE Center, which works to prevent child abuse and support survivors. All three are located within blocks of the Veldman Clinic.

“We have a role to play within the system that is already in place, so we need close collaboration with community partners to ensure we are adding value and addressing needs rather than recreating something that already exists,” Valentino said.

A strong internal team of about 20 staff across the Veldman Clinic, Shaw Center, and Human Neuroimaging Center are essential to supporting the research of faculty and graduate students and the services they provide.

Staff clinicians, including a licensed clinical social worker, are joining the clinic to expand the amount and types of care the University can provide. In the past, the Notre Dame Department of Psychology has only offered clinical services provided by graduate students who are training to become psychologists and are supervised by faculty.

With licensed clinicians adding to the students’ work, the number of clinical care and impact hours annually provided by Notre Dame is projected to increase from 8,000 to 27,000. The clinic’s impact will be even wider as graduate students earn their doctorates and start their own practices, and as evidence-based interventions developed through research are implemented in community settings throughout the region and across the country.

Every person working at the clinic has a role to play in fulfilling the clinic’s mission. The administrative coordinator, who welcomes visitors at the front desk, is trained in de-escalation tactics, ready to be a mental health crisis first responder. Data managers, community liaisons, the Office of Information Technology, facilities teams, research assistants, and other professionals will also contribute to the clinic’s work, adding to the countless hours already put in by architects, designers, and project managers.

“It definitely takes a team across the entire campus to make it all happen,” said Heidi Miller, assistant director for staff management and operations at the clinic. “We all believe in what we’re doing, and that’s what makes it work.”

Originally published by Adah McMillan at ndworks.nd.edu on May 04, 2026.

In partnership with three of the University’s Strategic Initiatives, the Franco Institute is funding seven new interdisciplinary collaboratives.

Arts Collaboratives (co-sponsored by the ND Arts Initiative):

Through a project titled “Archipelagos of Race,” Thomas Anderson, professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, and Xavier Navarro Aquino, assistant professor of English, will investigate the artistic, linguistic, and cultural dimensions of race and ethnicity in the Caribbean through theoretical inquiry and artistic output.

Tatiana Reinoza, associate professor of art history, and history professor Karen Graubart seek to integrate humanities studies to ask broad questions, often related to policy, in their lab titled “Central American Racial Formations.” They believe that integrating humanities-based analysis with questions more commonly addressed through social sciences and policy will produce deeper and more people-centered scholarship and open new paths for understanding social injuries, connectivities, and conflicts.

Global Catholic Research Collaboratives (co-sponsored by the ND Global Catholic Research Initiative):

In “Medieval Roots to Global Networks: Catholic Sisters and the Archive,” Katie Bugyis, associate professor in the Program of Liberal Studies and director of postdoctoral studies, and CJ Jones, director of the Medieval Institute and professor in the Department of German, Slavic, and Eurasian Studies, draws on archival collections to examine how Catholic women religious communities understood, interpreted, and transmitted their histories as makers of historical knowledge who shaped their own institutional identities through scholarship, pedagogy, and archival practices.

Associate professor of philosophy Therese Cory and theology professor Paulinus Odozor have formed an international working group for their collaborative titled “Vatican II: Renewal within Tradition.” This collaborative works with 150 members engaged in the ongoing interpretation of the second Vatican Council and its significance for the global Church and in regional contexts.

Kathleen Sprows Cummings, director for the Global Catholic Research Initiative, values the Strategic Initiatives’ partnership with the Franco Institute.

“The Global Catholic Research Initiative is proud to partner with the Franco Family Institute in supporting two of this year’s Research Innovation Collaboratives,” Cummings said. “By funding ‘From Medieval Roots to Global Networks: Catholic Sisters and the Archive’ and the International Working Group, ‘Vatican II: Renewal within Tradition,’ GCRI is investing in projects that exemplify the global scope, historical depth, and interdisciplinary strength of Notre Dame scholarship.”

In sum, Cummings stressed the importance of the Research Innovation Collaboratives’ role in scholarship at Notre Dame.

“Together, these collaborations advance the University’s mission to become the preeminent hub for research on global Catholicism,” she said.

Humanities Collaboratives:

William Donahue, professor in the Department of German, Slavic, and Eurasian Studies, will work with Jens Martin of the University of Amsterdam on a project titled “Contested History in Public Spaces: Toward a Global Memory Culture.” Their collaborative re-thinks terminology around public memory to accommodate the challenges around a “memory culture” that functions in dynamic and sometimes unpredictable patterns.

For their collaborative titled “Symphonic Wings Part II: Sustaining Our Common Home through Faith, Science, and Art,” Cynthia Katsarelis, assistant professor of the practice in Sacred Music and Ritornello Chamber Orchestra Director, and Paul Kollman, associate professor of theology, will turn their symphony project Symphonic Wings into a lasting and public-facing platform for thinking about insects through lenses of faith, culture, history, ethics, and care for the living world.

Sustainability Collaboratives (co-sponsored by the ND Just Transformations to Sustainability Initiative):

History professor Julia Thomas will partner with Benjamin Goossen, an assistant professor of international history at Boston University, on “Asia and the Anthropocene: Bringing Human Histories and Earth History Together.” Their collaborative approaches the human activity of the Anthropocene from Asian perspectives to address what may be most useful about the Anthropocene as a distinctive framework for Asian histories and what drawbacks to such a framework may exist.

Originally published by Jacob Schepers at franco.nd.edu on May 05, 2026.

The Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) at the University of Notre Dame has named Holly Kuzmich as its next Michael L. Smith Managing Director following a national search. She will begin her role on July 7.

Kuzmich brings experience across venture philanthropy, national policy, and organizational leadership. Most recently, she served as a managing director at the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, where she partnered with social entrepreneurs to help scale high-impact organizations.

Previously, Kuzmich was executive director of the George W. Bush Institute, where she led a 45-person team and guided the organization’s strategic direction. She also held senior roles in the federal government, including assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education and associate director of the White House Domestic Policy Council.

“Holly brings an exceptional combination of leadership, policy expertise, and commitment to evidence that will help shape LEO’s next chapter,” said Jim Sullivan, co-founder of LEO and director of the University’s Poverty Initiative. “As we expand our partnerships and deepen our impact, her experience scaling organizations and navigating complex systems will be critical to ensuring that what we learn translates into meaningful change for the communities we serve.”

Her work has focused on using data and evidence to inform decision-making and improve outcomes at scale — an approach closely aligned with LEO’s mission to reduce poverty through evidence-based solutions.

“The evidence that LEO produces is vitally important to our nation's poverty-fighting organizations — and most importantly, to those living in poverty — as well as policymakers and philanthropy,” Kuzmich said. “LEO has quickly become a national leader, and I'm excited to build on its foundation and scale what works. I can't imagine a better institution than Notre Dame to take on this bold and important mission.”

Kuzmich will relocate to South Bend, her childhood hometown, as she steps into the role. She joins LEO as the organization continues to expand its partnerships and advance the use of evidence in policy and practice.

Originally published by Kathryn Desai and Tracy DeStazio at leo.nd.edu on April 28, 2026.

The Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Common Good hosted its inaugural Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton Culture and the Public Good Symposium on April 10. Named for two of the foremost socially engaged Catholic thinkers of the 20th century, the signature annual event culminated a year of themed research support at the institute.

This year's speakers were Vauhini Vara, journalist and author of The Immortal King Rao and Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age ; Shankar Vedantam, author and host of the Hidden Brain podcast; Jenny Odell, artist and author of How to Do Nothing and Saving Time; and Rainn Wilson, award-winning actor, comedian, and New York Times bestselling author.

Notre Dame Magazine editor Jason Kelly recapped what these famous faces and voices had to say about our strained attention spans, how tech companies seek to monetize our time, and what we can do to cultivate deeper, more engaged life experiences.

Despite the shelving decisions of many bookstores, author Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing is not a self-help book, a genre that promises readers nuggets of influencer insight to nourish their optimization quests. Instead, the book critiques the notion that even leisure should be curated in the service of economic efficiency.

“I have a whole section where I insist that the point of reading my book is not to make you feel refreshed enough to be more productive at work on Monday,” Odell said. “Rather, it’s to question our notions of productivity overall. What is considered productive labor and what is not, and why? It’s an important distinction to make, I write, when the phrase self-care is appropriated for commercial ends and risks becoming cliche.”

Odell was one of four featured speakers at the Downes Ballroom on campus April 10 for the inaugural Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton Culture and the Common Good Symposium. The event focused on attention (pun intended), the annual research theme for the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good.

Panelists were asked, “How should we hold attention?”

That has become an especially pressing question as we reckon with the costs of how we pay attention today. Nobody needs to be reminded that distractions are omnipresent. As we speak, white noise courses through my headphones to keep my mind on writing this rather than whatever my face-down phone has to entice me. (Nothing. I checked.)

Read more from Notre Dame Magazine

According to a recent study from the University of Notre Dame, voters who are comfortable living in the middle — neither agreeing nor disagreeing when asked about substantive issues relevant to upholding democracy — might be the largest group to blame for democratic decline in the United States.

These “democratic neutrals” are what the study’s co-authors consider some of the most dangerous voters in the current political environment.

Neutrality as leverage in democratic backsliding

Using three surveys of more than 45,000 voting-age Americans, the researchers found that about half of the U.S. population expresses an attitude of democratic neutrality — or an “unwillingness to support or oppose policies or practices that undermine democracy,” explained Matthew E.K. Hall, lead author of the study recently published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

“Neutrality towards democracy, rather than outright opposition, has enabled democratic backsliding among various Western democracies as elected officials leverage citizens’ neutral attitudes to pursue antidemocratic outcomes,” Hall and his two co-authors wrote in their study.

The danger in this “neither support nor oppose” mentality lies in its lukewarm approach to what matters and to which lines should or should not be crossed when it comes to protecting our democracy. And that, Hall said, is problematic because if the public isn’t willing to hold its leaders accountable, then there’s nothing to stop them from behaving in ways that undermine democracy.

Neutrality on both sides of the aisle

Hall, who is the David A. Potenziani Memorial College Professor of Constitutional Studies in Notre Dame’s Department of Political Science and the director of the Rooney Democracy Institute, conducted the research with B. Tyler Leigh, research fellow at the Rooney Democracy Institute, and Brittany C. Solomon, the Thomas A. and James J. Bruder Assistant Professor of Administrative Leadership in the Mendoza College of Business.

Relying on data from two surveys they conducted in the summers of 2024 and 2025, and a third, larger survey sent weekly through the YouGov panel between 2022 and 2023, the researchers asked participants about their attitudes toward undemocratic practices. The questions included whether they agreed, disagreed or felt neutral when asked about their support for four examples of undemocratic practices: reducing outparty polling stations, ignoring outparty court decisions, remaining loyal to the party over the Constitution, and censoring partisan media.

Roughly 50 percent of participants checked the neutral category for at least one question. In contrast, outright agreement with undemocratic practices was much less common. But, between the two segments, up to two-thirds of respondents did not actively oppose undemocratic practices on the part of government officials, political candidates and leaders.

“Not actively opposing undemocratic practices is different than actively supporting democracy,” Hall said.

Neutrality, the researchers noted, is especially concerning because it can be associated with authoritarianism, tolerance of norm violations, extremism, distrust, and obscuring antidemocratic views.

Another, equally critical point, Hall said, is that this neutrality exists at similar rates on both sides of the aisle, among Republicans and Democrats, as well as nonpartisans.

Why voters remain neutral

The researchers identified several reasons that voters choose the “neither agree nor disagree” category. Hall explained that some Americans tolerate politicians undermining democracy on a conditional basis if it means those entities enact policies they favor, but then they don’t like those same undemocratic decisions when made by leaders in the other party. They vote according to the mantra, “It depends.”

Some voters are just uncertain about which direction to lean, or believe they don’t have the knowledge or understanding to vote appropriately. Other voters are simply indifferent or apathetic — they simply do not care about politics. Another group of neutrals are ambivalent toward the survey questions because they care strongly in two conflicting directions and feel indecisive. A fifth group actually supports anti-democratic policies but feels social pressure to say they don’t, so they feign neutrality.

“Regardless of why Americans express neutrality, those who do so are just as likely to vote for authoritarian politicians as the relatively small number of Americans (less than one in five) who explicitly support undemocratic practices,” Hall said.

Potential solutions ahead of the 2026 midterms

Hall and his co-authors said that neutrality is not only a big problem, but it’s also a problem that will take a novel approach to fix.

“The problem is the people sitting on the sidelines, not paying attention or prioritizing short-term issues over the long-term stability of this country,” Hall said. “This will require a completely different approach with regard to persuasion strategy when you realize that’s the group we — as proponents of American democracy — need to be focusing on. Promoting democracy is going to look a little different than we thought.”

What does that promotion look like then? Hall and his co-authors see the primaries for the approaching 2026 midterm elections as the next opportunity to encourage Americans to vote for candidates who will support and protect American democracy. Messaging will need to encourage voters to “vote against candidates who undermine American democracy — even (and especially) if they are candidates from their own party,” emphasizing that staying neutral will no longer suffice.

“American politics have really been shaken in this last decade, particularly with regard to partisanship and polarization,” Hall said.

“The elites have lost control of the throttle, and the mass public is driving — and that’s not necessarily a bad thing if the mass public values democracy. But if they don’t value democracy, then we will spin out.”

This research aligns with the University’s Democracy Initiative, which aims to establish Notre Dame as a leader in the study of democracy both in the United States and worldwide, as a convenor for conversations about and actions to preserve democracy, and as a model for the formation of civically engaged citizens and public servants. The initiative also bridges research, education, and policy work across multidisciplinary units.

The research was supported by the Rooney Democracy Institute, which is dedicated to promoting scholarship, knowledge, and dialogue on American democracy.

Contact: Tracy DeStazio, associate director of media relations, 574-631-9958 or tdestazi@nd.edu

Originally published by Tracy DeStazio at news.nd.edu on April 21, 2026.

But they can’t do it on their own. They need editors, publishers, translators, donors, and supportive spouses — people Michel Hockx calls “travel agents.”

As an expert in Chinese literature who’s published four monographs, seven edited volumes, a book-length translation, and dozens of journal articles, Hockx is a literary travel agent himself. Now, he’s researching how other agents have guided the trajectories of Chinese writers as their work moves throughout their country and beyond.

In support of this work, Hockx has been awarded a fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), one of the world’s foremost centers for intellectual inquiry into the sciences and the humanities. He will spend the 2026-27 academic year at the IAS campus in Princeton, New Jersey, working on his next book, tentatively titled “Modern Chinese Writers and Their Travel Agents.”

“I’m delighted to be able to spend a year at IAS and interact with others who work in literature and culture, as well as those who come from different fields and different places,” said Hockx, a professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Notre Dame. “To be part of the community and work on my research — it’s going to be great.”

The IAS fellowship will mark the end of Hockx’s 10 years leading the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, during which he significantly increased the number of Asia-focused faculty fellows, secured two major Korea Foundation grants, helped to integrate the institute into the Keough School of Global Affairs, and strengthened University relationships with partners in Asia.

As he begins his next chapter writing his next book, Hockx isn’t starting from scratch — he’s drawing from research and relationships he’s cultivated throughout his career.

The foundation of the project is Chinese poet Wu Xinghua, whom Hockx first wrote about in 1999. Wu began writing during World War II while living in Japanese-occupied Beijing, and when Communist forces entered the city in 1949, he stayed to pursue a career outside poetry. However, his friend Song Qi relocated to Hong Kong and later Taiwan, and brought Wu’s poems, publishing them under a different name.

“Wu’s poems influenced this whole generation of Taiwanese and Hong Kong poets, but nobody knew who he was except for a few people,” Hockx said.

Wu died in China’s Cultural Revolution, before scholars looked into his pseudonymous work decades later. It was then that his story came to light, and his works were finally published. Hockx received some manuscripts from Wu’s family during that time, becoming part of the trajectory of Wu’s writing and legacy.

In the book’s first chapter, Hockx will delve deeper into Wu’s story and the literary travel agents who ensured his writing survived. Hockx also hopes to uncover more stories from the Cold War era, when others often risked their lives to carry texts outside of China.

The rest of the book will draw from Hockx’s more than 30-year career, during which he connected with writers such as novelist Hong Ying.

He’ll also devote a chapter to translation’s role in the travel of Chinese literature, specifically focusing on the decisions translators make when they have to change a text, which are sometimes motivated by censorship or to smooth the subtle ridges of cultural differences. Hockx explored the effect of censorship in his book Literature and Censorship in Modern China, which was published in March. Working on that particular piece helped him realize how much he wanted to gather and unfold different aspects of his career.

“Writing that book opened the floodgates,” he said. “I realized that there’s so much that I know from reading over the years and talking to people and writing articles.”

While Hockx doesn’t have to hunt down too many new research leads, it’s certainly not an easy task to pull together decades of work. But it’s necessary to capture a nuanced image of the world of Chinese literature.

“People think everything in China is very unidirectional, very monotonous, very restrictive for writers,” Hockx said. “But that’s just never been my experience.”

While censorship and political pressure exist in China, Hockx said he doesn’t want them to limit how other scholars view the creativity displayed both in print and online. Learning about Chinese literature, he said, can reveal insights about mobility and globalization more broadly.

“I don’t make decisions about what is good about literature,” Hockx said. “I just look at what’s out there.”

In this podcast episode of Notre Dame Stories, Melissa Kearney, the Gilbert F. Schaefer Professor of Economics and director of the Strengthening Families Research Initiative, explores the decline in marriage, the rise of single-parent households, and the falling fertility rates in the United States. Drawing on decades of research, she connects these trends to economic inequality, child well-being, and public policy—making the case that strengthening families is essential to improving outcomes across society.

Listen and subscribe to Notre Dame Stories, the official podcast of the University of Notre Dame, wherever you get your podcasts.

With a significant new investment, the University of Notre Dame’s College of Arts & Letters is launching the Human Neuroimaging Center to drive innovation in interdisciplinary neuroscience and uncover how brain networks shape the remarkable capacities of the human mind.

The center’s work explores enduring questions in the psychological and brain sciences, including how the biological foundations of the mind enable learning, resilience, and flourishing — capacities central to the fullness of human life.

Led by Aron Barbey, the Andrew J. McKenna Family Professor of Psychology, who joined the Notre Dame faculty last fall, the center advances an integrated vision of modern neuroscience grounded in scientific rigor, humanistic insight, and ethical responsibility.

“Neuroscience opens new ways of understanding the human mind and the lives it shapes,” Barbey said. “Advances in brain imaging now allow us to see the brain with remarkable precision, revealing the constellation of networks that underlie perception, memory, language, and thought. Once uncovered, insights from neuroscience move beyond the laboratory, shaping how learning is defined, how mental illness is understood, and how responsibility and care are imagined.”

Barbey and his research team will utilize advanced neuroimaging techniques — including high-resolution functional and structural MRI, diffusion tensor imaging, and computational modeling — to investigate the foundations of human intelligence.

He joined Notre Dame’s Department of Psychology after faculty appointments at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. At Illinois, he held multiple leadership roles at the Beckman Institute, including director of the Center for Brain Plasticity. He later served as the Mildred Francis Thompson Professor and director of the Center for Brain, Biology, and Behavior at Nebraska.

His previous research — supported by more than $30 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and several other organizations — has explored how intelligence emerges from the network organization and dynamics of the human connectome, applying methods from cognitive neuroscience, experimental psychology, and computer science.

“At Notre Dame, I believe we have a remarkable opportunity to lead in neuroscience because of the breadth of expertise on our campus — not only in psychology, and increasingly in neuroscience, but also in the humanities and social sciences.” – Aron Barbey, Andrew J. McKenna Family Professor of Psychology

Ultimately, his work aims to deepen understanding of the neural foundations of intelligence and to advance innovations in cognitive enhancement, neurorehabilitation, and biologically inspired artificial intelligence. Barbey’s research investigates how the brain’s finite architecture gives rise to the flexibility of human intelligence — our capacity to learn, adapt, and solve the diverse problems we face in life.

The Human Neuroimaging Center, co-located with the Veldman Family Psychology Clinic at 501 N. Hill Street in South Bend, will support a growing group of Notre Dame human neuroscience faculty, including three junior faculty who will arrive this fall, with more new hires planned for the coming years.

Barbey, his team, and other neuroscientists will use a state-of-the-art Siemens Magnetom Cima.X 3 Tesla whole-body MRI system to produce structural, functional, and metabolic brain imaging, enabling characterization of the human connectome with remarkable precision.

“Neuroscience offers a profound new lens through which we can view the human experience — one that enriches our existing strengths in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, offering new ways of developing deep insights about how we think, feel, and interact,” said Kenneth Scheve, the I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts & Letters. “At the same time, this center will help us build meaningful scientific collaborations across campus in a way that establishes Notre Dame as a leader in the holistic study of the human mind.”

The center is organized around seven research themes that investigate how brain networks support the capacities that shape human life — and how this knowledge can be used with care and responsibility:

• Neuroscience of human intelligence — How do differences in the organization and dynamics of the human connectome shape memory, attention, reasoning, and problem solving?

• Neuroscience of lifespan development — How does connectivity evolve from childhood through adulthood, and how do experiences — including education and embodied practices such as handwriting — influence developmental trajectories?

• Neuroscience of belief systems — How do executive, social, and affective brain networks support belief systems and moral decision making, including participation in social, ethical, and religious practices?

• Neuroscience of mental health — How do changes in brain network function contribute to mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions, and how can insights into these changes advance diagnosis and new approaches to treatment?

• Neuroscience of traumatic brain injury (TBI) — How does TBI disrupt and reorganize the network architecture of the human connectome, and how can neuroimaging guide better diagnosis and treatment protocols in student-athlete and military populations?

• Neuroscience of human performance in military service — How do multiple dimensions of performance — across cognitive, physical, and neurobiological measures — change over the course of military service, and how can long-term measurement help strengthen readiness while supporting the health and resilience of service members?

• Neuroscience of brain health promotion — How can modern scientific interventions — including cognitive training, non-invasive brain stimulation, mindfulness meditation, physical activity, and nutrition — shape brain connectivity to promote brain health and resilience across the lifespan?

  

“The mission of our neuroimaging center is to advance neuroscience through rigorous research that is attentive to the broader human questions that inspire it,” Barbey said, “seeking not only to understand the complex and dynamic networks of the human brain, but also to ensure this knowledge benefits the individuals and the communities that we serve.”

Through these themes, Barbey sees ways for neuroscience to engage directly with broader questions of human development, belief, health, performance, and responsibility — ensuring that scientific advances are interpreted in light of history, culture, and enduring questions of human meaning.

“At Notre Dame, I believe we have a remarkable opportunity to lead in neuroscience because of the breadth of expertise on our campus — not only in psychology, and increasingly in neuroscience, but also in the humanities and social sciences,” he said. “The brain is more than a biological system; it underlies how we think, learn, and relate to one another. Its activity is shaped by biology and experience — including culture, history, family, and community. For that reason, neuroscience matters not only for what it reveals about the brain, but for how its insights enrich learning, promote health, and enable flourishing — in service of human dignity and the good we share.”

Titled “Endowed by Their Creator: Catholicism, the Declaration of Independence, and the American Experiment at 250,” the symposium will take place Thursday, April 9, 2026, on CUA’s campus in Washington, D.C. The gathering is intended to serve as a premier scholarly forum during the semiquincentennial year, convening leading academics, jurists, and public intellectuals to consider the philosophical and theological foundations of the American experiment in constitutional self-government.

“This anniversary provides an opportunity not merely for celebration, but for serious intellectual examination,” said Phillip Muñoz, director of the CCCG. “The Declaration advances claims about human equality, rights, and moral accountability that remain foundational to our political life. The Catholic intellectual tradition has long engaged these same questions. Our hope is to foster a careful and rigorous conversation about their relationship and their continued significance for constitutional government.”

Joel Alicea, a professor at CUA and the director of CIT, underscored the importance of hosting the symposium in the nation’s capital.

“At 250 years, we are called to reflect more deeply on the principles that have shaped the American experiment,” Alicea said. “By bringing scholars of Catholic thought into dialogue with the Declaration’s arguments, this symposium aims to clarify the moral and philosophical foundations of our constitutional order and to explore the resources available for its renewal.”

The daylong program will begin with Mass at 9:15 a.m. in St. Vincent Chapel, followed by three academic panels and two keynote conversations.

The first panel, “The Declaration and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition,” will feature Bradley Lewis of CUA; Vincent Phillip Muñoz of Notre Dame; and D. C. Schindler of the John Paul II Institute, moderated by Michael Promisel of CUA.

A lunch keynote and fireside chat will follow, featuring Robert P. George of Princeton University in conversation with his former student, Fr. Henry Stephan, O.P. of Notre Dame.

The second panel, “The Declaration and Constitutional Interpretation,” will include Kevin Walsh of CUA; Judge Whitney Hermandorfer of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit; and Charlie Capps of Arizona State University, moderated by Alicea.

The third panel, “Catholic Social Thought and the American Experiment,” will feature Russell Hittinger of CUA; Kenneth Grasso of Texas State University; and Ryan T. Anderson of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, moderated by CUA’s Sarah Gustafson.

The symposium will conclude with a private dinner for students and alumni of the Notre Dame and CUA programs with Brett Kavanaugh, associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Kavanaugh, who was nominated to the Court by U.S. President Donald Trump, took his seat on Oct. 6, 2018.

All sessions will be recorded and made available for later viewing to ensure broad access for those unable to attend in person.

Launched in 2021, the Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government at Notre Dame seeks to cultivate thoughtful and educated citizens by supporting scholarship and education concerning the ideas and institutions of constitutional government. For additional details, including registration information, visit constudies.nd.edu/america250.

Contact: Anna Bradley, CCCG Assistant Director, 574-631-8050 or abradle4@nd.edu

Originally published by Anna Bradley at constudies.nd.edu on March 05, 2026.

Stepping into Kate Marshall’s office is a bit like stepping into a one-room museum, with antique typewriters, artifacts of early cinema, and book-making tools among the pieces on her shelves.

“The objects I keep around me represent what I’m really excited about in humanist work,” she said. “There’s often an element of materiality — I’m interested in how texts are made and what media go into making them.”

This feature is part of a College of Arts & Letters story series called “Office Hours,” which provides a glimpse into the personal and professional lives of Arts & Letters faculty through their workspaces around campus. This installment highlights Marshall, the Thomas J. and Robert T. Rolfs College Professor in the Department of English, whose research and teaching focus on the interactions of media, technology, and genre in contemporary literature.

In this interview, Marshall discusses important pieces in her office that inspire her and are relevant to her writing, her roles as associate dean for research and strategic initiatives and director of the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good, and her personal life.

Marshall’s answers have been edited for clarity and conciseness.

Q: What do you want people to feel when they enter your office?

A: I want them to feel welcome and excited about research in the college.

The objects I keep around me represent what I’m really excited about in humanist work. I also have books related to the Franco Institute’s research theme, which this year is attention. For example, I have a book by one of the speakers of our symposium, How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, over here. I also have some books in the office that are related to the future of the humanities, something that we talk and think about in the Institute.

I think that it is important to pair your intellectual projects with the administrative work you do. I’m writing a book about the novella and reading short fiction in the age of attention, so I have a lot of very short books on my bookshelf — the things that I’m trying to think about as I continue my own research.

Q: What are the stories behind your typewriters?

A: These three are all very special to me. This is not my entire typewriter collection, but these are three key examples. They all have stories — and I think they look good.

They’re from different eras. The black typewriter, the Underwood, is an early 20th-century typewriter, and they were made in the same factories that were manufacturing weapons for World War I. The way in which media technology and military technology have gone together, I think, is an interesting part of its story.

The seafoam-colored typewriter is called a portable Hermes, Hermes being the winged messenger. It’s heavy, but you could carry it around. I really like it for the literary connection. The portable Hermes is the typewriter fictionalized in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley — the one he used to forge identities.

The red typewriter, which is called the Valentine, is made by the Italian company Olivetti, and it’s an icon of 20th-century design. The case and the red, molded plastic typewriter have a really important design history, too.

When I moved to South Bend in 2009, there was still an open typewriter repair shop on Mishawaka Avenue. It’s since closed, but it made me feel like this town was a good home for me.

Q: When you’re sitting here, stuck with one of your projects, where do you look to get your mind rolling again?

I always look to the bookshelf. There are more novellas on this shelf than I could possibly write about in a single book, and I love to rearrange and move through them.

There’s a stack of the books that have been published in the book series I edit with the organization Post45 in the past few years. The theme of this series is literature and culture after 1945 — not necessarily explicitly American, but in the wake of the American century as a larger political and economic formation.

My second book, Novels by Aliens, came out a few weeks after I started the position as director of the Institute, so when I finally got to hold that book in my hands, I had just started working here in this office. The thesis of the book is that in the 21st century, there’s a desire for ways of seeing the world that are nonhuman. This is motivated by environmental concerns and ideas about agency that go beyond what has traditionally been understood as human.

I look at different interdisciplinary ways that this desire manifests in contemporary fiction and at its literary history. This is largely a story about genre, and one that I’ve continued to explore as I write my new book about the novella.

I also have a pile of all the objects I’ve found mudlarking. Mudlarking is when you walk along a river, specifically the Thames River in London, and you look for objects that wash up from the water that had been deposited or lost for years, even hundreds of years. You learn how to understand the tides, and you have to learn how to identify the things you find. I’ve found some clay pipes from different eras. One of them is Victorian and has a cricket bat design on it. Another is from the 18th century, and one is even older, probably from the 16th or 17th century. Two other pieces I have here are a fragment of a medieval shoe buckle and a fossilized tooth of either an older form of livestock or even some kind of larger animal — some of these teeth have been identified as belonging to mammoths.

Q: Your office has so many items from the past — what’s your newest piece?

The most recent addition to the office would probably be a very kitschy figurine of the statue of Athena from Nashville, Tennessee. There’s a huge replica of the Parthenon and the statue of Athena in Nashville, so I picked that up when I was giving a lecture at the humanities center of Vanderbilt University last year.

That’s next to a tiny Adirondack chair, which is probably a little bit older but is maybe my most valued possession in the office. I teach in the summers at a place called the Bread Loaf School of English. Most of the students in the program are high school teachers, and I teach literature there. I live in Robert Frost’s farmhouse, and I experiment with different ways of teaching literature that I bring back to my classroom here, too.

When you are awarded a chair at Bread Loaf — I was named the Frank and Eleanor Griffiths Chair in 2019 — you’re presented with a teeny-tiny Adirondack chair as a memento of that award. It lives here as a reminder of the institution and the other people across the country who also have this award.

Q: Do you have anything here from your students?

A: There are a few objects that have been made by my students over the years. That yellow and blue print is something made on the letterpress. It’s an excerpt that the student typed up from The Professor’s House by Willa Cather, which I taught in a graduate seminar. I also have this tiny work of book art that a student made.

The framed newspaper clippings were a gift from my first doctoral student. I started working with this student as her dissertation chair the year I came here, and she wrote a terrific dissertation about radio and modernism. And then when she left to take her job in New York, she left that with me as a memento of our time together.

It’s not everything, but keeping these objects in my Institute office helps me remember why we’re doing the work that we’re doing — supporting research, thinking about students, thinking about how we talk about the value of this work and really support it, both on campus and off. It’s nice to have some of those documents of students and ideas as a reminder for the why — why we do this work in the College.

Q: What serves as a good reminder in your office?

This image from an episode of The Twilight Zone called “Time Enough at Last,” which is the current working title for my book on the novella.

That picture is of the actor Burgess Meredith. In the show, his character is someone who’s a bookworm and feels like he doesn’t have any time to read. His home life doesn’t allow him to read, and neither does his job at a bank — his wife and supervisor get mad at him when he’s reading instead of working or doing anything else. So he’s beset with all of these problems with reading.

Then there’s a huge nuclear explosion or some kind of apocalyptic catastrophe, and he has locked himself in the bank vault to have time to read so no one can find him. He survives, and he comes out into a wasteland. There’s no one else in the world.

And then he finds the library, and this is the moment from which the title of the episode comes. He’s stacked up all the books in what order he’s going to read them in, and he says, “Books, books! Time enough at last!” And that’s exactly when he breaks his glasses.

That was the image that popped into my head when I got offered my job in the English department at Notre Dame in 2009. I wondered what was going to happen next, and I had so much joy, but I also knew that it would be something I shouldn’t take for granted.

Q: What’s changed since you moved to this office?

English professors are fairly solitary. You teach, you work with students in classrooms, and you work with students in your office, and then you occasionally come together as a department or work on a committee. The rest of the time you are writing and reading alone.

But when I started working in this institute, everything about my life was both enriched by and dependent on all of the amazing people who work here. I spend five days a week in this office, and it’s a very alive, very permeable space. We all fit in a pretty tight space where we work with undergraduates, we work with graduate students, we occasionally meet members of the community, we work with faculty. So we have a few different teams: people who work on faculty projects, a team that works on the student projects, a really amazing outreach and events team that’s helping us do a lot more of our public-facing work as well as shepherd our fellowship programs. It’s a very collaborative workplace.

It’s really extraordinary to be at a university that is investing in the humanities and the liberal arts. Humanities, arts, and social science research are central to Notre Dame’s mission not only for faculty, but also for graduates and undergraduates. That is absolutely galvanizing, but none of it is possible without an extraordinary group of people to make it happen — and the people in the Franco Institute are just really making it happen.

The University of Notre Dame announced today that its Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) will serve as the national evidence partner for Right at Home, a new cross-sector initiative led by Destination: Home to stop homelessness before it starts. LEO will provide the research backbone for the initiative — working alongside pilot communities to generate rigorous evidence, measure outcomes, and share what is learned to strengthen and scale homelessness prevention nationwide.

Backed by $77 million in new funding support from various benefactors, Right at Home aims to keep more than 10,000 households at high risk of homelessness stably housed in 10 pilot locations across the country over the next five years. By scaling an evidence-based prevention model, Right at Home sets out to prove that homelessness prevention works and is replicable nationwide, building the case for national prevention policy and funding.

Across the country, homelessness rates are rising, and housing costs continue to strain renters. Half of American renters are unable to afford their housing costs, and economic pressures are pushing more people into crisis every day. Once someone becomes homeless, challenges compound quickly, making prevention a critical component of any meaningful response.

Right at Home builds on a proven prevention model that provides financial assistance and case management to support families on the brink of losing their homes, but before they become unhoused, and takes it a step further by expanding that model across the country. That model was spearheaded by Destination: Home and Sacred Heart Community Service in Santa Clara County, California, and evaluated by LEO researchers.

“We have a moral obligation to take evidence to impact,” said Rachel Fulcher Dawson, interim managing director and head of policy and impact at LEO. “When we find strong evidence that something is effective, it’s not enough to publish a result. We have to make sure that evidence gets used by replicating and scaling what works, so communities across the country can benefit.”

LEO’s study found that individuals who received financial assistance through Santa Clara County’s Homelessness Prevention System were significantly less likely to become homeless even a year later. The model also demonstrated strong cost effectiveness, with LEO researchers finding that every $1 invested saved almost $2.50 in benefits to the community.

By intervening earlier, this approach has helped nearly 44,000 people locally avoid the profound trauma of homelessness and has reduced the need for far more costly public interventions after housing has been lost — such as shelters, emergency health care, and other crisis services.

“The single most obvious solution to homelessness is stopping it before it starts, yet our country continues to respond only after people fall into crisis,” said Jennifer Loving, CEO of Destination: Home. “We have proven that targeted homelessness prevention works locally, and now it’s time to prove that this can work all across the country. We should never let people, in the worst moments of their lives, suffer even more.”

In the U.S., most homelessness intervention programs only focus on responding to individuals and families once they have already lost their housing, with far fewer efforts aimed at targeting them early enough to prevent the loss of housing in the first place. The result is a backlog of overwhelming needs and cascading issues. Right at Home and its partners are hoping to intervene at a crucial turning point in the individual and family’s life in order to bring the right amount of help at the right time. LEO’s expertise will step in to provide evidence to impact.

The 10 pilot communities covered by the initiative include cities, counties and tribal nations, and represent areas with varied economic conditions and housing markets, including both rural and urban regions. Communities were selected based on showing urgent need, spanning diverse geographies, demonstrating strong on-the-ground and cross-sector collaboration and offering clear pathways for future local public-private investment.

So far, Right at Home community partners include Alaska (Alaska Coalition on Housing and Homelessness); Asheville Region, N.C. (Asheville-Buncombe Continuum of Care); Atlanta, Ga. (Partners for HOME); Austin-Travis County, Texas (Ending Community Homelessness Coalition); County of San Mateo, Calif.; Denver-Adams County, Colo. (Metro Denver Continuum of Care); Miami-Dade County, Fla. (Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust); and Minnesota (Minnesota Tribal Collaborative Pathways to Housing), with two additional locations to come.

To stand up the Right at Home support systems locally, organizers will rely on the Homelessness Prevention System Toolkit, co-developed by LEO, Destination: Home and Results for America. This toolkit provides the technical assistance foundation for testing and adapting this model in all the selected locations. Right at Home, in conjunction with technical assistance partner Homebase, will use it to implement this approach in the new contexts while building the evidence base for national policy change.

Each Right at Home replication site will provide flexible financial assistance to address immediate needs such as rent, utilities or other urgent housing-related costs. It will also include supportive services such as legal assistance or other interventions that help remove barriers to housing stability, all of which will be delivered through local community partners and systems. Assessments will also be conducted to ensure families are connected to the appropriate Right at Home assistance and that needs are matched accordingly. Each pilot site will receive a minimum of $5 million over three years to stand up their local program.

Working with Right at Home and the pilot communities, LEO will test and rigorously evaluate the impact of rapid, flexible financial assistance, and inform the case for a national prevention policy.

“We already have strong evidence that targeted prevention can keep people housed,” said David Phillips, LEO director of research. “Right at Home is a chance to take those results to impact at a national scale. By working alongside communities, we can learn what it takes to deliver strong outcomes in different places — and share what works so leaders can strengthen and sustain prevention over time. Most importantly, we can help more people stay housed before a temporary crisis becomes homelessness.”

LEO's work aligns with Notre Dame's Poverty Initiative, a University-wide effort to create a world intolerant of poverty by expanding knowledge about how to solve it.

The Right at Home initiative is supported by a coalition of cross-sector partners, including Cisco, Homebase, Notre Dame’s LEO, Silicon Valley Community Foundation and Sobrato Philanthropies. To date, Destination: Home has secured $77 million in funding to support the Right at Home initiative. Funders include The Audacious Project — a collaborative funding initiative housed at TED that encourages the world’s greatest changemakers to dream bigger — Cisco, Sobrato Philanthropies, and the Valhalla Foundation.

The Right at Home initiative anticipates all pilot sites to begin implementation by January 2027, with some sites starting as early as this fall.

Destination: Home, a public-private partnership working to end homelessness, leads the Right at Home initiative. Through a collective-impact model, the nonprofit convenes and collaborates with community stakeholders to address the root causes of homelessness and drive systemic change in Silicon Valley and beyond. Using a data-driven, human-centered approach, Destination: Home advocates for effective policies, incubates new programs, and invests in strategies that connect more homeless neighbors to stable housing and prevent homelessness before it begins.

Contact: Tracy DeStazio, assistant director of media relations, 574-631-9958 or tdestazi@nd.edu

Originally published by Kathryn Desai and Tracy DeStazio at news.nd.edu on February 24, 2026.

The University of Notre Dame’s Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) is working with Catholic Charities Fort Worth (CCFW) and Goodwill Industries of Michiana to replicate CCFW’s Padua program in the Michiana region — marking the first-ever Padua mission site in the nation.

Goodwill Michiana’s launch is a major step in a broader effort to expand evidence-based poverty-reduction models to more communities. Through its partnership with Franchise for Good, LEO is applying franchising principles to help evidence-backed programs like Padua expand while protecting what makes them work.

Created by CCFW and named after St. Anthony of Padua — the patron saint of the poor — Padua aims to move clients permanently out of poverty by providing them with intensive, wrap-around case management services. The Padua program uses a client-led, long-term, and research-driven approach to redefine traditional case management.

The program was rigorously evaluated by LEO to test the impact of Padua on labor market and other outcomes. Using a randomized controlled trial, LEO researchers studied a group of more than 400 program participants, only 40% of whom were employed upon enrollment and whose income placed them at about two-thirds of the federal poverty line.

LEO researchers found that through the Padua program, participants were 25% more likely to achieve full-time employment — while also reporting significant improvements in overall health and well-being. The intervention was particularly effective for those not employed at enrollment. For this group, the intervention led to a 67% increase in the probability of working full-time and a 46% increase in monthly earnings. Those who lacked stable housing before enrollment were 64% more likely to secure stable housing.

In the years since the study, LEO has worked alongside Catholic Charities Fort Worth to translate those findings into a model that can be replicated with integrity. That work focuses on identifying the program’s core components and supporting partners to implement them with fidelity as Padua expands to new communities.

"Padua shows what’s possible when evidence, dignity and partnership come together,” said Jim Sullivan, LEO co-founder and director. “We have evidence this program works, and replicating it through trusted partners like Goodwill Michiana is how that evidence can improve lives far beyond where it began.”

Bringing Padua to Michigan and Indiana represents a significant expansion of Padua’s research-backed, holistic approach to ending poverty, extending its reach beyond North Texas to empower more families on their path to lasting stability. The launch of the Padua mission site in Michiana underscores a shared commitment to advance proven, compassionate solutions that empower individuals and families to achieve more for their futures.

“Padua was built with a vision to meet people where they are — a client-led program that honors human dignity, builds emotional resilience and delivers real results,” said Brendan Perry, director of Padua National at Catholic Charities Fort Worth. “Taking this research-backed model beyond Fort Worth for the first time marks a major step in our mission.”

Goodwill Industries of Michiana, a respected leader in workforce development and community services, will be the first organization in the nation to replicate the Padua model — bringing its people-first approach and strong community infrastructure to families across the region.

“We are excited to launch the nation’s first Padua mission site right here in our region,” said Debie Coble, president and CEO of Goodwill Industries of Michiana. “This partnership empowers families with personalized support so they can build lasting stability and independence, and truly achieve their most abundant lives.”

Padua pairs each client with a dedicated two-person navigator team who provides personalized, judgment-free support in areas such as housing, employment, education, and health. Unlike traditional programs, Padua has no time limits — navigators walk alongside clients for as long as it takes to reach stability and independence.

With a case management staff that works to meet every individual where they are, clients are equipped to tackle both personal and financial challenges, learning how to manage resources, set boundaries, and maintain accountability. They are empowered to use the skills and tools they learn to change their trajectories and make their way to a better future.

Contact: Tracy DeStazio, associate director of media relations, 574-631-9958 or tdestazi@nd.edu

Originally published by Kathryn Desai and Tracy DeStazio at news.nd.edu on January 26, 2026.

Imagine talking to your favorite stuffed animal — something you confide in at 7 years old because you know that an inanimate object won't share your secrets, invalidate your feelings, or question your motives.

But what if it starts talking back? For today's and tomorrow's children, that's likely to become a common reality.

A Silicon Valley startup has created a stuffed animal with a Wi-Fi-enabled voice box, linked to a chatbot powered by generative artificial intelligence. The company promises lively companions that can elevate children’s play with stimulating conversation, and in order to prevent parental concerns about the content of chats, it’s designed its toys to stay cheery and avoid inappropriate topics.

Tom Stapleford isn’t so sure that forethought goes far enough.

“Bringing folks together from different parts of the University, you make connections you had no idea about because you didn’t even know that this research existed, much less that there was somebody at Notre Dame working on this area." - Tom Stapleford, associate professor in the Program of Liberal Studies

“None of that addresses the question, ‘Is it really good for children to be engaging with a chatbot?’” said Stapleford, an associate professor in the Program of Liberal Studies and scholar of the history of science and virtue ethics at the University of Notre Dame.

Stapleford and colleague Patrick Gamez argue that if AI will actually help humanity, there’s a need for more than just regulations — there’s also a need to consider how AI can enable and facilitate human well-being.

To accomplish that goal, the duo created the Generative AI Research Innovation Collaborative, one of the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good’s inaugural set of interdisciplinary research groups. The collaborative gathered scholars from across campus who are interested in generative AI and its intersections with the humanities.

“What we wanted to do was convene a network of researchers and provide a space for them to pursue interdisciplinary research,” said Gamez, an associate teaching professor in the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values and director of its five-year dual degree program in the College of Arts & Letters and College of Engineering. “It’s through the cross-pollination of ideas with a bunch of people from different backgrounds that these projects grow.”

Before the collaborative, Stapleford and Gamez knew of other Notre Dame researchers working to answer generative AI questions, but the lab’s workshops brought everyone together to share ideas and research, as well as their questions and doubts about the largely uncharted field.

Those conversations included Lisa Schirch, the Richard G. Starmann Sr. Professor of the Practice of Peace Studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs, who is using AI systems to facilitate democratic discussions. Alexi Orchard, an assistant teaching professor in Arts & Letters’ Technology and Digital Studies Program, is gathering data on interactions between generative AI and her students — one of the groups most impacted by the rise of AI. In an August workshop, Gamez presented his research on the intertwined histories of AI and counterintelligence, and Stapleford discussed AI and labor.

“Bringing folks together from different parts of the University, you make connections you had no idea about because you didn’t even know that this research existed, much less that there was somebody at Notre Dame working on this area,” Stapleford said. “It just sends out sparks in all kinds of different directions.”

Analyzing AI’s potential for good

The collaborative began as a reading group led by Robert Goulding, an associate professor in the Program of Liberal Studies and director of the Reilly Center. The group discussed the work of German philosopher Martin Heidegger in relation to AI and language — which seemed important as large language models like ChatGPT began to produce more humanlike speech, Gamez said.

To him and Stapleford, the reading group proved the value of philosophical, interdisciplinary conversations around AI, and they wanted to keep talking.

Along with Goulding, the researchers began working on an application for a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to continue researching AI and the humanities at Notre Dame. And when they received Franco Institute funding to start their research collaborative, they saw an opportunity to further develop the ideas in their grant proposal and bring more scholars into the effort.

“At each workshop, all sorts of themes come up,” Gamez said. “We heard talks about empathy and spirituality and freedom — all sorts of dimensions of our interaction with AI agents.”

Discussions fostered through the collaborative brought the idea of AI’s agency to the forefront. Agency is a complicated concept to conclusively characterize, and its definition and application can vary from scholar to scholar. For example, an engineer might say ChatGPT is an agent because it behaves intelligently, but a philosopher may disagree, arguing that a being needs consciousness to be an agent, Gamez said.

Balancing these perspectives, the Collaborative found value in using the agency of AI as a lens for their analysis.

“AI systems respond to their environment in a dynamic way, and even though they’re not consciously striving after goals, they have certain functions that they’re trying to maximize,” Stapleford said. “We want to recognize that and find helpful ways of talking about it.”

In categorizing AI as an agent, members of the collaborative were able to apply the concepts of virtue ethics, a philosophical approach that gets at the key differences between avoiding bad and doing good. If AI is an agent, AI has the potential to do good, to help people do well — though figuring out how to make that happen is another undertaking entirely.

“What can we do to craft AI systems such that they really enable and facilitate human flourishing?” Stapleford said.

Guiding the future with virtue

The Notre Dame Program on AI and the Development of Ethics in Agents (ND-PAIDEIA) will attempt to answer that question. The proposal crafted by members of the collaborative won a three-year, $500,000 NEH grant to establish a permanent research operation and continue what the workshops started.

From its roots in the Reilly Center, ND-PAIDEIA collaborates with other university institutes, including the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society, the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good (ECG), and the Institute for Social Concerns. The University also recently received a $50 million grant from the Lilly Endowment to support broader work on faith-based approaches to AI ethics.

“It seemed important to all of us that the Reilly Center should help to build this network because we are, by definition, a place for the interdisciplinary, humanistic, and social study of science and technology,” Gamez said.

The program will feature three distinct themes, providing scholars with various contexts through which to explore agency and ethics in AI: virtue, human judgment and creativity, and politics and democracy. Program members will continuously conduct research and craft policy suggestions within these themes, such as how AI can be effectively implemented in the city of South Bend.

“There just is nothing like what we are in the process of putting together anywhere else right now.” - Patrick Gamez, associate teaching professor in the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values

A workshop in January will aim to draft a paper to outline a virtue-based approach to the development and implementation of AI systems.

“It’s intended to be a kind of a practical guide,” Stapleford said. “It’s going to suggest how research in philosophy and virtue ethics can help programmers and managers who want to design AI systems that will be beneficial for the people in their communities.”

In May, a public conference will call for papers addressing different questions and concerns related to virtue and generative AI. ND-PAIDEIA will also present the workshop results to receive feedback, which they’ll use to refine the paper over the summer.

The following academic year will see ND-PAIDEIA’s first hackathon, with multidisciplinary teams of undergraduate students collaborating on research projects that involve developing or using AI systems. Students will also participate in trainings on virtue ethics and AI.

Fitting the theme of human judgment and creativity, the first hackathon will focus on translation. Because translators can’t just map words one-to-one across languages, translation is a significant application area for AI.

“What happens when we outsource the translation process to an AI system?” Stapleford asked. “What happens when we don’t have humans making judgments about it? Where can things go wrong?”

In its third year, ND-PAIDEIA will aim to produce more research and host a second hackathon, in partnership with the City of South Bend and local community groups interested in implementing AI systems.

In addition to providing students with an opportunity to contribute to ND-PAIDEIA’s research, the hackathons will also serve as a platform where authors of the paper can witness firsthand how their work can make a difference.

“We set up these ideas in the paper — what is it like to try to put them into practice?” Stapleford said.

He and Gamez are hopeful the work of ND-PAIDEIA will make virtue a larger priority in the broader conversation on AI ethics. Virtue isn’t a common topic in the field, and it’s almost unheard of for an AI research center to be based in the humanities. But the scholars of the collaborative have seen what the humanities have to offer, and they’re ready to continue their unique exploration.

“There just is nothing like what we are in the process of putting together anywhere else right now,” Gamez said.

When John Babbo first stepped onto the University of Notre Dame’s campus, he imagined himself studying great books and cheering in the student section. He didn’t imagine that the ideas he encountered would eventually lead him toward the priesthood.

Babbo graduated from Notre Dame in 2024 with a degree from the Program of Liberal Studies (PLS) and minors in constitutional studies and business economics. Babbo was also a member of the Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government’s (CCCG) Tocqueville Fellowship for four semesters.

As a Chicago native, Babbo chose to attend Notre Dame due to its combination of academics, football culture, and Catholic identity. During his time, Babbo was introduced to the CCCG by a fellow PLS classmate and friend. This introduction, coupled with his interest in exploring political philosophy more deeply, inspired him to pursue the constitutional studies minor.

Babbo reflected on two influential classes he took through the minor — the first being a class on Nicomachean Ethics and Aristotle's Politics taught by associate professor Susan Collins, which he described as “one of the best classes I ever took.” Babbo credited this class as planting the intellectual seeds that were influential in discerning major life decisions upon graduation.

During his senior year, Babbo enrolled in the course “Cortex and Constitutionalism,” taught by both professor Patrick Deneen and Phillip Munoz, the Tocqueville Professor of Political Science. Babbo recalled reading The Odyssey, The Republic, and The City of God, the latter of which has continued to shape his thinking in both his personal and professional life. Reflecting on this course’s influence, Babbo said it encouraged him to see himself as “a pilgrim on a pilgrim’s journey,” and to consider whether “to serve the city of God or the city of man.”

Alongside the constitutional studies minor, Babbo participated in the Tocqueville Fellowship program during his sophomore and senior years. The colloquia and readings offered outside of a traditional classroom setting deepened Babbo’s interest in political philosophy. Babbo appreciated the caliber of the CCCG’s invited speakers, noting that meeting them in small settings, such as breakfast or lunch, allowed for a unique perspective. Those conversations, he explained, allowed him to see each speaker “as a person, not when they're public speaking, but on a more personal basis. I loved that.”

Outside of the academic realm, Babbo particularly enjoyed the community he found through the fellowship.

“I felt like I met so many friends who I would not have met outside of the program,” he said.

Looking back, Babbo admitted he had been surprised by the longevity of the friendships he formed through the center and attributed them to the fellowship’s thought-provoking colloquia and informal conversations that took place alongside them.

During his time at Notre Dame, he also developed a love for investing during his sophomore year, describing it as a form of “applied philosophy.” The technological and psychological components involved in investing touched on many of his intellectual interests, and after graduation, Babbo worked at a small investment partnership firm based in Boston.

Despite having a career and being surrounded by colleagues that he loved, Babbo recounted experiencing a sense of “restlessness.” This feeling persisted until he met Fr. Pete, a priest at Gate of Heaven Parish in Boston, whose joy and contentment prompted Babbo to reflect on his own state of vocational restlessness.

“For the first time in my life, the radicality of the Catholic faith really impressed on me,” he said. “And if Jesus is God, then that has to change my life in some very important ways. And if Jesus is really present in the Eucharist, how am I not at Mass every day? How am I not crawling in on my knees?”

The combination of his restlessness and this epiphanic realization of the radicality and importance of his Catholic faith ultimately brought Babbo to pursue the priesthood.

Now, as a postulant with the Congregation of Holy Cross, Babbo encourages current Notre Dame students to approach classwork as an end in itself, rather than a means to an end of simply getting a job.

“Looking back, I appreciate the quality of the education I got at Notre Dame in the constitutional studies minor, which I think you don’t appreciate as much when you’re in the middle of it,” he said. “This sort of is Christendom, it feels like to me, so make sure you get your faith really strong here, then you can go out in the world and evangelize.”

To learn more about the Constitutional Studies minor and the Tocqueville Fellowship Program, please visit our webpage.

Originally published by Allison Bowman at constudies.nd.edu on December 12, 2025.

What is the ideal society? What policies, practices, procedures, and structures are required to obtain that ideal? Might the pursuit of perfectionism become the enemy of the good? These questions were the focus of a conference that took place at Notre Dame Beijing on December 20, 2025. Utopias and Their Pursuits was organized by Liang Cai, an associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame with financial and program support from the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion and the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good.

The conference brought Catholic, Islamic, Greco-Roman, and Chinese thought and historical experience into conversation with each other. Themes included philosophical and theological considerations and critiques of utopia; policies and events guided by utopian ideals; and the ways that utopian ideals inform current world discourse. Twenty scholars from seventeen different academic institutions participated over two days of presentations and discussion kicked off by two keynotes: the first from Yuri Pines, the Renmin University of China, and Michael W. Lipson Professor in Chinese Studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, titled “Between Utopianism and Realism: Early Chinese Political Thought,” and the second from Keith Knapp, professor of history at the The Citadel on “Confucian Utopian Egalitarianism: The Equalization of Fields System (Juntian zhi 均田制) and Its Ideological Origins.”

One of the organizers of the conference, Alex Hsu, assistant teaching professor of global affairs in the Keough School of Global Affairs, spoke about how the conference was imagined.

“Liang and Mahan Mirza and I cooked up this idea to organize conferences to reconsider utopia,” he said. “First, we wanted to acknowledge that utopias can have deep philosophical, civilizational, and religious roots: There is real wisdom about societal perfection in our core 'axial age' texts that contemporary Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Confucians, etc. want to draw on in making the world a better — but maybe always imperfect — place. Second, we wanted to create an opportunity for civilizational dialogue around religious visions of social engineering.”

Cai explained her interest in Utopian studies in an interview about utopianism and confusionism.

“I'm interested in how philosophical thoughts of utopia play out in history,” she said. “Confucianism is a utopia-oriented philosophy and religion, and Confucians strive for a perfect society. They want to create a world where people pursue virtue as their primary life goal. If everybody is virtuous, then, they believe, everything, including the universe, would be in harmony. Not only do Confucians elaborate on their utopian thoughts on paper, but once they entrenched their position in the political realm, they also integrated their doctrines into the imperial legal system and crafted their philosophy into imperial policies. My research examines how the real world — society and individuals who are always imperfect — responded to or were shaped by those perfect visions of society.”

Alexander Beihammer, Heiden Family College Professor in the Department of History, commented that this was one of the best conferences he has attended and expressed his hope to work with Notre Dame Beijing in the future.

Simon Wolfgang Fuchs of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem remarked, “The breadth of topics and speakers was wonderful and the conference organizers did an admirable job of hosting us so generously. Utopias and Their Pursuits raised many issues that will surely stay with me for the foreseeable future.”

Professor Jinyu Liu of Emory University stated, “Thank you to everyone in Beijing and South Bend for making the conference a memorable, enjoyable, and productive event. Thank you as well to the sponsors for the marvelous hospitality and generosity.”

Participants also had the opportunity to visit the Great Wall on an outing organized by Notre Dame Beijing executive director Jingyu Wang. According to Wang, it was fitting that the conference be held in Beijing.

“For years, Notre Dame Beijing has served as a vital hub in China for the University of Notre Dame, showcasing the groundbreaking academic achievements of ND faculty while uniting students, scholars, and educators from around the world,” Wang said. “This dynamic global presence has been instrumental in sparking meaningful conversations, building cross-cultural connections, and promoting mutual understanding across borders. We were honored to host this three-day international conference — featuring scholars and graduate students from Notre Dame, China, Europe, and peer institutions like the University of Pennsylvania and Fudan University — that sparked vital exchanges on a comparative history of the east and west."

Cai expressed gratitude for the hospitality of Notre Dame Beijing.

“Notre Dame Beijing provides a safe and supportive or a sanctuary space for the discussion of academic topics in China,” she said. “Because of the independence that Notre Dame Beijing possesses, there is no need to seek administrative approval from any local institutions to hold academic conferences. This independence helps secure freedom of speech and freedom of thought.”

Levi Checketts, a University of Notre Dame alumnus and now a professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, also spoke about his institution’s co-sponsorship.

“Hong Kong Baptist University is happy to have co-hosted this conference on utopianism with the University of Notre Dame in Beijing,” he said. “As one of the few Christian universities in China, we were excited for this opportunity to work closely with such a well known Catholic university in the U.S. As global scholars gathered to discuss Eastern and Western visions of ideal societies, we hope that our own contributions brought both important insights and contributed to facilitating further conversations between Chinese and Western scholars.”

Hsu affirmed the importance of hosting these conversations on utopian ideals, noting that the conference between Catholic and Confucian scholars and scholars of Chinese thought could just be the beginning of ongoing dialogue that compares utopian thought.

“We are hoping that having scholars discuss and appraise different species of utopian ideas and their successes and failures, we can not only work around 'civilizational clashes' that seem to define the multipolar world right now, we can eventually open the door for the global scholarly community to work together to help achieve what seems impossible,” he said.

Participants in the conference are affiliated with institutions including the University of Notre Dame, the University of Crete, Emory University, NYU Shanghai, the University of California, Santa Barbara, Chongqing University, the University of Texas at Austin, Leiden University, the University of Naples “L’Orientale,” the Academy of Korean Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University, the University of Louisville, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the University of Pennsylvania. It was sponsored by the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion, the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good, the Kellogg Institute for International Development, Notre Dame Global, the Medieval Institute, and the Center for Applied Ethics at Hong Kong Baptist University. The full schedule for Utopias and Their Pursuits can be viewed here.

Originally published by Rebekah Go at ansari.nd.edu on January 09, 2026. Republished at medieval.nd.edu on January 19, 2026. 

“Whatever you value, be committed to it and let nothing distract you from this goal. The uncommitted life, like Plato’s unexamined life, is not worth living.” —Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C., 1979

Inspired by the legacy of Fr. Hesburgh, the Institute for Social Concern’s Justice & Society Minor invites students into an interdisciplinary community of scholars committed to a more just world. The minor is designed for students who refuse to accept the world simply as it is. It is for students who aspire to be the spark for change.

The minor brings together classical theoretical inquiry and contemporary practical application. As society faces increasingly complex challenges, students engage different classical and contemporary theories of what is right, just, and fair while gaining the research skills that are essential to create meaningful change.

“We believe that a commitment to justice is a fundamental lens through which to understand, experience, and, indeed, change the world,” said Suzanne Shanahan, the Leo and Arlene Hawk Executive Director of the institute.

“Whether pursuing a degree in engineering or English, students gain a foundational understanding of justice with which to enhance their degree,” she said. “The minor forms leaders of consequence through a constructive collision of perspectives where business and biology majors grapple with wicked problems, bringing their unique expertise to the table.”

“A commitment to justice is a fundamental lens through which to understand, experience, and, indeed, change the world.”

Dan Graff, professor of the practice at the institute and co-director of the minor, noted that the minor is “rooted in the institute’s commitment to combining rigorous academic inquiry with authentic community engagement.”

He added that “the minor synthesizes traditional interdisciplinary scholarship with practitioner knowledge and wisdom to help students imagine and promote uniquely just solutions to today’s most pressing social problems.”

The curriculum is structured to allow students to build on their current majors, adding a robust understanding of what justice is and how it intersects with pressing issues such as emerging technology, global migration, and labor practices. Students master the foundations of historical and contemporary theories of justice while learning how to use data and inquiry to foster a more just world.

“Injustice doesn’t respect departmental boundaries. It is deep-rooted and complex,” Graff said. “To eradicate it, students must learn to build upon — and then transcend — their major expertise.”

“Injustice doesn’t respect departmental boundaries.”

The program consists of a 15-credit pathway, beginning with a foundational course titled Doing Justice, taught by Graff. The dynamic course offered this spring is a deep dive into the different theories of justice but also introduces a set of contemporary and historical case studies in the form of memoirs, plays, and exhibits for students to apply the theoretical traditions.

Students then select three elective courses from across the institute and University. In this way, they customize their education and supplement their understanding of justice through diverse perspectives and disciplines.

The culmination of the minor is a collaborative capstone studio called Delivering Justice. In this course, students transition from classroom inquiry to public scholarship. They develop tangible projects — such as policy memos, op-eds, or exhibits — based on the original research they have conducted throughout the program.

This emphasis on public-facing work ensures that students graduate with a portfolio that demonstrates their ability to communicate complex ideas to a wider audience and implement justice-oriented solutions in their future careers across fields and professions.

“Students learn to see the people impacted by injustice as names and not numbers.”

“Motivated by Catholic social teaching, our core courses move students from theory to informed action,” explained Connie Snyder Mick, professor of the practice and co-director of the minor. Eschewing lifeless abstraction, Mick emphasizes that students in the minor approach questions of justice by getting proximate to those most affected.

“Students learn to see the people impacted by injustice as names and not numbers,” Mick said. “And through collaborative research, they draw from, integrate, and refine the skills they bring from their major to advance the cause of justice in society.”

This story was originally published on socialconcerns.nd.edu on January 14, 2026.

The new three-year program, called the St. Joseph County Universal Wellness Project, aims to help bridge the gap in local mental health care for young people through in-person or digital single-session interventions — evidence-based approaches that can make a meaningful difference in mental health in a short amount of time.

The program will train 75 local providers to offer a one-time, solution-focused meeting with youth in need of mental health support. It will also offer local youth access to an online platform that provides a self-directed experience, utilizing videos, tips, and suggestions on available resources to help create a plan for improving their mental health.

“We are taking evidence-based methods developed through rigorous research and creating a way to scale them so they reach the people who need them most,” said Kristin Valentino, a Notre Dame professor of psychology and director of the Veldman Family Psychology Clinic, which will lead the project locally. “In addition to giving local youth free and anonymous mental health support tools, we believe this project will strengthen our community and serve as a national model for scaling county-level interventions."

Developed by Jessica Schleider — a Northwestern associate professor of medical social sciences and founding director of the Lab for Scalable Mental Health — and her team, the digital and provider-delivered single-session intervention programs have shown through dozens of clinical trials to reduce youth depression and anxiety symptoms for up to 12 months and increase motivation to seek further care. Collectively, these brief, barrier-free programs have helped more than 100,000 individuals and families improve their coping abilities and have proven effective across a diverse range of youth populations.

Schleider’s free digital intervention platform, Project YES, will be adapted for St. Joseph County youth by the Veldman Clinic and community partners, and its clinical and implementation effectiveness will be evaluated over the course of a year.

“This is a dream project for me, and precisely the sort of work I’m in this field to push forward,” Schleider said. “Single-session interventions, because of how scalable they are, really fill these untouched gaps in the mental healthcare system that high-intensity treatments like weekly psychotherapy delivered by professionals were never built to address.”

The Veldman Clinic, opening this spring at 501 N. Hill St. in South Bend’s East Bank neighborhood, will significantly enhance the research of faculty in Notre Dame’s Department of Psychology and offer immersive training for clinical psychology graduate students, who will be empowered to share pioneering evidence-based mental health practices with communities across the country. It is a key component of the Health and Well-Being Initiative in the University’s strategic framework, which emphasizes a commitment to addressing the nationwide mental health crisis.

Schleider’s approach has already been effectively deployed through a program in Montana, and serves as an example of the effectiveness of implementation science — taking evidence-based methods developed through research and developing means of scaling them to maximize their reach and effectiveness.

“The St. Joseph County Universal Wellness Project is an incredible opportunity for the Veldman Clinic to implement evidence-based interventions and build strong community partnerships as it opens its doors,” said Kenneth Scheve, the I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts & Letters. “Dissemination work of this caliber will be a core component of the clinic’s efforts to enhance mental health care throughout the region and nationwide, and I can’t wait to see the transformative impact this program has for youth in our area.”

To tailor the program to the needs of the community and ensure its tools are accessible to and meet the needs of local populations, the Veldman Clinic will recruit four community advisory boards comprised of providers and leaders of local schools, community organizations, healthcare providers, parents, and youth.

The program is actively seeking members for one-year terms on its community advisory boards. Nominations are welcome from individuals with lived, professional, or community experience relevant to youth mental health — especially those connected to schools, pediatric/behavioral health, youth services, and parent/caregiver networks.

Founded by Anita and Tom Veldman, the Valinhos Foundation is a private family foundation dedicated to improving the mental health and overall well-being landscape for youth, families, and communities across Indiana.

The grant will also support the establishment of a robust, interconnected network that will provide practical resources to help navigate challenges posed by rapidly developing AI. Based on principles and values from Christian traditions, the framework is designed to be accessible to people of all faith perspectives.

“We are deeply grateful to Lilly Endowment for its generous support of this critically important initiative,” said University President Rev. Robert A. Dowd, C.S.C. “Pope Leo XIV calls for us all to work to ensure that AI is ‘intelligent, relational and guided by love,’ reflecting the design of God the Creator. As a Catholic university that seeks to promote human flourishing, Notre Dame is well-positioned to build bridges between religious leaders and educators, and those creating and using new technologies, so that they might together explore the moral and ethical questions associated with AI.”

With the support of a $539,000 planning grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. awarded in October 2024, ECG spent the past year mapping the landscape of faith-informed work in AI ethics. Drawing on insights from more than 200 conversations with representatives of these various constituencies, ECG created DELTA, a Christian-inspired ethical framework that stands for Dignity, Embodiment, Love, Transcendence, and Agency. The framework was launched at the inaugural Notre Dame Summit on AI, Faith, and Human Flourishing in September 2025.

“Lilly Endowment’s continued support enables Notre Dame to address one of the defining questions of our time — how to guide the use of artificial intelligence with wisdom, responsibility, and a commitment to human dignity,” said John T. McGreevy, the Charles and Jill Fischer Provost. “As a leading global Catholic research university with deep partnerships across technology, faith, and academia, we are uniquely positioned to convene these conversations.”

“The depth of engagement and support from the wide variety of participants at the Notre Dame summit for further development of the DELTA framework was most compelling,” said N. Clay Robbins, Lilly Endowment’s chairman and CEO. “Lilly Endowment is pleased to support this effort that acknowledges the beneficial opportunities AI offers while encouraging uses of AI that align with important moral and ethical values that draw from religious insights and traditions.”

Notre Dame’s DELTA network will be organized around interdisciplinary and intergenerational communities of practice focused on education, pastoral ministry, and public engagement. The communities of practice will come together to learn about and engage with the principles of the faith-based ethical framework. They will nurture relationships between those who are developing AI technology and those in education, workplaces, religious communities, and a variety of public settings who must discern ethical ways to use AI.

As part of the project, ECG will launch a series of programs to encourage and support young adults to lead with convictions shaped by DELTA principles. In addition, by developing hubs in communities in Silicon Valley and the Northeastern U.S., the institute will invite tech leaders and the public to engage with DELTA principles through issue-focused events and retreats.

“With this work, Notre Dame and ECG will deepen our mission to grow networks of corporate leaders, faith leaders, educators, storytellers, and others to advance ethics and the common good. Given the monumental impact that AI will have on our lives, this work is more vital than ever.”

-Meghan Sullivan, the Wilsey Family College Professor of Philosophy and director of ECG and the Notre Dame Ethics Initiative

Each community of practice will be supported by a timely, high-impact slate of resources, programs, and events that will enable and leverage sustained engagement with the DELTA framework, developing a common language and set of tools that will energize and guide conversations around the ethics of AI and its applications.

DELTA builds on collaborations already in place around technology ethics, including the University’s partnership with IBM through the Notre Dame-IBM Technology Ethics Lab.

“Here at Notre Dame, we’re committed to shaping public thought about how humans can flourish in an AI-driven world by drawing upon our Catholic and Christian tradition,” said Meghan Sullivan, the Wilsey Family College Professor of Philosophy and director of ECG and the Notre Dame Ethics Initiative. “With this work, Notre Dame and ECG will deepen our mission to grow networks of corporate leaders, faith leaders, educators, storytellers, and others to advance ethics and the common good. Given the monumental impact that AI will have on our lives, this work is more vital than ever.”

Those interested in staying connected with DELTA and this work may visit ethics.nd.edu/DELTA to join the DELTA mailing list.

Notre Dame has always focused on ethics in both research and formation. In 2024, the University intensified its commitment to the field with the launch of the University-wide Ethics Initiative, which aims to establish Notre Dame as a premier global destination for the study of ethics, offering superb training for future generations of ethicists and moral leaders, a platform for engaging the Catholic moral tradition with other modes of inquiry and an opportunity to forge insights into some of the most significant ethical issues of our time.

A signature element of the Ethics Initiative, the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good facilitates interdisciplinary research in foundational and applied ethics, coordinates projects that cross departments and units, and supports ethics-related education and public engagement efforts.

Lilly Endowment Inc. is a private foundation created in 1937 by J.K. Lilly Sr. and his sons Eli and J.K. Jr. through gifts of stock in their pharmaceutical business, Eli Lilly and Company. While those gifts remain the financial bedrock of the Endowment, it is a separate entity from the company, with a distinct governing board, staff, and location. In keeping with the founders’ wishes, the Endowment supports the causes of community development, education, and religion and maintains a special commitment to its hometown, Indianapolis, and home state, Indiana. A principal aim of the Endowment’s religion grantmaking is to deepen and enrich the lives of Christians in the United States, primarily by seeking out and supporting efforts that enhance the vitality of congregations and strengthen the pastoral and lay leadership of Christian communities. The Endowment also seeks to improve public understanding of religion and lift up in fair, accurate, and balanced ways the roles that people of all faiths and various religious communities play in the United States and around the globe.

Contact: Carrie Gates, associate director of media relations, 574-993-9220, c.gates@nd.edu

Originally published by Carrie Gates and Laura Moran Walton at news.nd.edu on December 19, 2025.

In its second year, the Democracy Catalyst Grant opportunity drew 48 applications from six of Notre Dame’s colleges and schools and several interdisciplinary institutes and student groups.

These investments, made through the Democracy Catalyst Fund, advance projects that closely align with the Initiative’s mission to strengthen democratic institutions, cultivate civic culture, and connect scholars and practitioners working at the forefront of democratic research around the world. In all, 24 faculty and student teams will examine pressing questions facing democracies today. These projects will create new opportunities for student learning and leadership in democratic research while bringing global scholars to campus through conferences, workshops, and symposia.

“Together, these grants represent the Initiative’s ongoing commitment to supporting rigorous scholarship that informs public debate, deepens civic understanding, and engages communities across borders,” said Joel Day, managing director of the Democracy Initiative.

The projects include multidisciplinary collaborations among more than 60 historians, data scientists, theologians, economists, and political scientists, as well as initiatives led by undergraduate and graduate students that expand the University’s capacity for democracy-focused research.

More details on each Catalyst-funded project, including descriptions and principal investigators, can be found on the Democracy Initiative’s website.

Launched in April 2024, the Democracy Initiative seeks to establish Notre Dame as a global leader in the study of democracy and as a convenor for conversations that defend democratic values and shape engaged citizens.

Funded Projects

Research

• Enrique Seira Bejarano, professor in the Department of Economics, will lead an evaluation on how Mexico’s 2025 judicial reform affects judicial independence, performance, and the rule of law. Bejarano will be joined by co-principal investigators Alejandro Ponce and Julio Rios.

• Muna Adem, assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, will lead an investigation into how and why group identities shape trust and cooperative behavior while identifying the conditions under which trust can extend across group boundaries. Adem will be joined by co-principal investigator Paul Kyumin Lee, a doctoral student and Notre Dame Presidential Fellow.

• Fiona Rodger, a doctoral student in American Politics, will lead an investigation into how the framing of laws banning transgender athletes from participating in sports that align with their chosen gender identity influence individuals’ level of support for transgender sports bans.

• Margaret Pfeil, a teaching professor in the Department of Theology and the Institute for Social Concerns, will produce an edited volume called “Religious Nationalism: Questions, Stories, and Practical Engagements.” Pfeil will be joined by Associate Professor David Clairmont.

• Gessica de Freitas, a research assistant at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, will lead an investigation into the growing empowerment of congresses in presidential systems that have historically been dominated by strong executives.

• Jeremi Panganiban, a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology, will lead a project examining how moral economies shape daily life in subsistence fishing communities undergoing rapid economic development.

• Susan L. Ostermann, an associate professor of global affairs and political science, will lead a project called “From Slacktivism to the Successful Gen Z Movement: Political Change and Democratic Quality in Nepal.” Ostermann will be joined by co-principal Investigators Madhav Joshi, a research professor in the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and associate director of the Peace Accords Matrix; Shrinivas Gautam; a research scientist in the Pulte Institute for Global Development; Lila Kumar Khatiwada, a senior research scientist at the Pulte Institute; and Mohammad Rashidujjaman Rifat, an assistant professor of tech ethics and global affairs.

• Joe Parent; a professor of political science, will lead a project called “Backlash to Globalization or Democracy? How American Trade Protectionism Affects Polarization and Democratic Attitudes in Brazil.” Parent will be joined by co-principal investigators Luis Schiumerini and Jazmin Sierra, both assistant professors in the Department of Political Science.

• Saehwan Lee, a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology, will conduct a large-scale randomized survey experiment with nationally representative participants to test how distinct or convergent status threat framings causally influence support for far-right politics and mobilization. Lee will be joined by co-principal investigators Sharon Yoon, an associate professor of Korean studies, and Dahjin Kim, an assistant professor of Asian studies and global affairs.

• Mayra Ortiz Ocaña, a doctoral student in political science, will lead an investigation into how populist executives dismantle or co-opt fourth-branch institutions, with a specific focus on Mexico under President López Obrador. Ocaña will be joined by co-principal investigator Benjamín García-Holgado, an assistant professor of political science and international relations at the University of Delaware.

• Gabrielle Grow, a doctoral student in constitutional studies and political theory and a Notebaert Premier Fellow, will lead an exploration of how state-level disestablishment in the early United States affected membership rates among new and established religious denominations.

• Ali Altiok, a doctoral student in peace studies and political science, will lead a project called “Competing for Youth Attention in the Age of Political Disinformation: Experimental evidence on the capacity of Kenyan youth to detect deepfake images.”

• Diane Desierto, a professor of law and global affairs and faculty director of the LL.M. Program in International Human Rights Law and the global director of the Notre Dame Law School Global Human Rights Clinic, will lead a project called “Exiled Women Leaders: Human Rights Impacts and Strategies of Resilience against Authoritarian Persecution in the Americas.” Desierto will be joined by research associate and research fellow Faisal Yamil Meneses.

• Shay Hafner and Amy Brooke Grauley, both doctoral students in political science, will lead a project called “Method-Aware Respondents and the Reliability of Online Political Science Experiments.”

• Emma Briant, a visiting associate professor in the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society, will lead a project called “Persuasive Procurement: How AI is Sold and Selected for Military and Intelligence Agencies.” Briant will be joined by co-pincipal investigator Walter Scheirer, the Dennis O. Doughty Collegiate Professor of Engineering.

• Guillermo Trejo, a professor of political science and a faculty fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, and director of the Notre Dame Violence and Transitional Justice Lab (V-TJ Lab), will lead a project called “Where are the Good Samaritans in Violent Democracies? Designing and Evaluating a Citizen-Led Public Campaign to Stimulate Empathy and Solidarity with 2,000 Victims of Enforced Disappearance in Acapulco, Mexico.” Trejo will be joined by political science doctoral students Laura López-Pérez and Mayra Ortiz-Ocaña, V-TJ Lab pre-doctoral student Jorge Ruiz Reyez, Natán Skigin, an assistant professor of comparative politics at the University of Georgia, and Jean Mendieta, a policy practitioner in the V-TJ Lab.

• Michael Coppedge, a professor of political science and a faculty fellow in the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, will lead a project called “Developing the Public Portal Prototype for AI-based Modeling of Democratic Development and Decline (AIM-3D Portal).” Coppedge will be joined by co-principal investigators Valentina (Valya) Kuskova, a professor and associate director at the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society; John Behrens, a professor of the practice, director of the Technology and Digital Studies Program, and director of digital strategy for the College of Arts & Letters; Dmitry Zaytsev, an associate professor of the practice at the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society; and Richard (Rick) Johnson, an associate professor of the practice and the managing director of the Applied Analytics and Emerging Technology Lab (AETL) at the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society.

Convening

• The Student Policy Network Team, led by Kaeleigh Picco, director of engagement for the Student Policy Network, and co-presidents of the Student Policy Network Alex Young and Sonia Zhang, will create a pilot Showcase in Washington, D.C.. The convening which will become an annual program designed to highlight Notre Dame students’ contributions to democratic engagement and public policy.

• Andres Mejia Acosta, the Kuster Family Associate Dean for Policy and Practice and an associate professor in the political economy of development, will lead an investigation into the strategic weakening of the administrative state itself in partnership with a workshop convening scholars and practitioners of the topic. Acosta will be joined by co-principal investigators Javier Perez Sandoval, a Kellogg postdoctoral research assistant in democracy, Derek Mitchell, a visiting professor of the practice in the Keough School of Global Affairs, and Andrea Perilla, a masters of global affairs student in governance and policy in the Keough School.

• The Ansari Institute team, which includes Scott Appleby, Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Global Affairs and interim director of the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion; teaching professor Mahan Mirza, executive director of the Ansari Institute; Alexander Hsu, assistant teaching professor of global affairs; and Rose Luminiello, assistant teaching professor in the Keough School, will hold a Global Fellows Program symposium in Rome in June 2026.

• James Curry, a professor of political science, Jeff Harden, the Andrew J. McKenna Family College Professor; and Rachel Porter, the Notre Dame du Lac Assistant Professor of Political Science, will host the first of annual one-day convenings to bring top scholars to Notre Dame, called “Chambers of Democracy: Annual Convenings on Legislatures as Central Institutions in American Democracy.”

• Horane Diatta-Holgate, an assistant teaching professor and the program director for faculty development, and Kristi Rudenga, director of the Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence, will lead a series of instructor training and networking sessions called “Teaching and Learning for Democracy Series: Structuring Classrooms for Effective Debates, Dialogues and Discussions in Polarizing Times.”

• Peter Quaranto, a visiting professor of the practice, Maura Policelli, executive director of the Keough School’s Washington Office and professor of the practice; and Derek Mitchell, a visiting distinguished professor of the practice at the Keough School's Washington Office, will convene a cross-section of experts and practitioners to consider ways to better integrate peacebuilding approaches and tools with ongoing efforts to strengthen democracy in the United States and globally.

Education and Formation

• Patrick Deneen, a professor of political science, will develop new undergraduate and graduate courses called Democratic Theory: Pre-liberal, Liberal, Anti-liberal, and Postliberal.”

Originally published by Emily Monacelli Guzman at strategicframework.nd.edu on December 15, 2025.

The percentage of American children raised in two-parent homes, however, is strikingly low. Nearly 30% of American children now live outside a married-parent home, with 20% living with only their mother. Research has shown that this gap in family structures contributes to class gaps in childhood resources, experiences, and outcomes, which simultaneously reflect and exacerbate inequality.

In partnership with the University of Notre Dame’s Poverty Initiative, the College of Arts & Letters has launched an interdisciplinary research endeavor aimed at addressing these issues by building and disseminating evidence that will inform policy to strengthen families, support parents and improve child well-being.

Led by Melissa Kearney, the Gilbert F. Schaefer Professor in the Department of Economics, the Strengthening Families Research Initiative has developed an ambitious research agenda that will foster policy-relevant work by scholars in economics, psychology, anthropology, and other disciplines.

“I am honored to join colleagues across the Notre Dame community in launching an initiative that takes up the need to strengthen families as a research and policy priority,” said Kearney, who joined the Notre Dame faculty this fall after 19 years at the University of Maryland. “Through rigorous scholarship and active engagement, this effort will deepen our understanding of the challenges facing families in America and identify solutions that promote healthy family formation and stability. This is a timely and important endeavor — and Notre Dame is exactly the right place for it.”

Kearney, who also directs the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, is the author of “The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind.” She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Her work has been published frequently in leading academic journals, and she has contributed pieces to The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Time.

The Strengthening Families Research Initiative has identified three key social challenges affecting family well-being: the number of U.S. children living with married parents has declined in the past 40 years; family structures differ significantly by education, race, and ethnicity; and children who grow up outside two-parent homes are at an elevated risk of poverty and other measures of economic and social disadvantage.

To address these challenges, Kearney and other scholars will examine fundamental questions that align with the University’s Catholic mission-driven commitment to fighting poverty, including:

• What are effective ways to improve the economic position of non-college-educated men, and to what extent do such efforts promote stable families and better outcomes for men, women, and children?

• How should government tax codes and transfer programs be reformed to promote, rather than discourage, the formation of stable marriages and families?

• What is the causal link between the legal and institutional frameworks around marriage and divorce and the decline in marriage and married-parent homes? How do these legal and institutional frameworks affect child and parent well-being?

• What types of programs and interventions advance healthy relationship formation and effective co-parenting? How successful are such programs at improving children’s and parents’ outcomes?

• How can systems that interact with vulnerable families be reformed and leveraged to better serve and strengthen families?

“The challenges facing families are immense. Understanding what works to strengthen families is crucial in the fight against poverty,” said Jim Sullivan, professor of economics, director of the Notre Dame Poverty Initiative, and co-founder and director of the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities. “The Poverty Initiative is proud to support the efforts of the Strengthening Families Research Initiative in their examination of what policies and programs best support family stability and social mobility.”

A focus on building strong families as part of an anti-poverty research and policy agenda is more complex than a focus on education, labor market, health care, or housing interventions, Kearney said. Families are deeply personal affairs, and relationships are complicated, but they do affect economic realities, children’s life trajectories, and societal outcomes.

Kearney believes that researchers, community leaders, and policymakers must collaborate to address barriers many face in creating strong and supportive family environments for themselves and their children. With support from across the University, she believes Notre Dame can be the place where those connections are made.

“The Strengthening Families Research Initiative embodies what makes Notre Dame distinctive: a deep commitment to rigorous research, to the fight against poverty, and to Catholic social teaching,” said Kenneth Scheve, the I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts & Letters. “We are thrilled that a scholar and leader as exceptional as Melissa has chosen Notre Dame as the place to do this work, and I look forward to supporting her and her team as they use the best social science evidence to understand what truly helps families thrive in the real world.”

Contact: Tracy DeStazio, associate director of media relations, 574-631-9958 or tdestazi@nd.edu

Originally published by Mary Kinney at news.nd.edu on December 02, 2025.