College of Arts and Letters // College of Arts and Letters

Film Festival Showcases Students' Projects

2012-02-09T16:00:00-05:00

One weekend last month, members of the Notre Dame community sat down to watch 16 films, ranging from comedies to dramas and documentaries, in one evening. But these movies weren’t made in Hollywood.

That’s because the 23rd annual Student Film Festival in the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center’s Browning Cinema showcased the work of many students in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre. The features were created in the various film production classes that took place during the fall 2011 semester.

“The Student Film Festival started as a small event in the basement of the Center for Continuing Education,” says Ted Mandell ’86, a professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre, who is currently in his 24th year at Notre Dame. “I think 50 to 75 people showed up. Anything students made in our production courses that they wanted screened got into the show. Needless to say, it was a bit long.”

The Student Film Festival has grown significantly since then, moving from the Snite Museum of Art to the Hesburgh Auditorium to the current multi-night event in the Browning Cinema. The length of the event has also been curtailed to about 110 minutes of films each year.

The films screened at the festival are the students’ class projects. Whether the class is centered on scripted or documentary filmmaking, the students are given great freedom to pursue their ideas.

“The great thing about the production classes is that they really throw us into the film making process. After we submit our dialogues for the scenes, we are set free to go do it,” says Grace Carini, a sophomore.

This means that the students are responsible not only for the creative elements of the films, but also the technical aspects. The projects are meant to challenge the students, and they do.

“The biggest challenge in making these films were definitely the time constraints that were set and working to complete professional-looking films as a college student,” says Kelsie Kiley, a senior who worked on two films for the festival. “I have multiple jobs, as well as other classes and projects, and it’s challenging when you want to fully immerse yourself in your film projects.”

Even after the filmmaking process was over, the students still had to endure the nerve-wracking process of screening their films to an audience of over 1,000 viewers, including friends, professors, and complete strangers, over the three-night festival.

“I was so nervous about seeing my films on the big screen,” Kiley says. “It’s terrifying because no one around you really knows that you are the filmmaker. People will make comments, laugh, and scoff without knowing that the creator is in the row in front of them. I went to two screenings and my palms were sweaty and my stomach was in knots both times.”

Collin Erker, a junior, recognizes the luxury that Notre Dame film students have to create and screen their works.

“The most fun part of making the films was just taking every chance we could to be ambitious,” he says. “We only get to make so many films at school. I wanted to be sure to try to be better every time.”

The students who participated in this year’s film festival are in great company. Many successful Notre Dame College of Arts and Letters alumni got their start in the student film festival. Last year, two pieces received special attention. The first, The Elect by Erin Zacek ’11 and Dan Moore ’11, was an official selection of the 2011 Los Angeles Film Festival as well as the internationally prestigious Angelus Student Film Festival. The second, Picking Up America by Marie Wicht ’11 and Michael Burke ’11 was a selection of 10 national film festivals and featured on both NBC and ABC national news broadcasts.

Other notable alumni filmmakers include: Jeremy Rall ’95, a music video director; Amy Winter ’91, the general manager of TLC Networks; Dave Chamberlin ’00, a producer; Jubba Seyyid ’92, a TV One Network executive; Andy Kris ’94, a sound mixer; M-K Kennedy ’97, the NBC vice president of production; Peter Richardson ’02, the 2011 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Award winner; and Lydia Antonini ’97, Warner Brothers’ director of digital development. Just a few weeks ago, John Hibey ’05 won the Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking at this year’s Sundance Film Festival as the producer and screenwriter of Fishing Without Nets.

Over the past 23 years, the Student Film Festival has become one of the most anticipated annual events on campus. Watching the pieces screened at the festival rewards the audience, but more than that, the experience of creating and screening their own films rewards the students.

“I would never have said this going into college, but I am going to enter the film or television industry after graduating. I was supposed to be a doctor,” Erker says. “I just can’t let go of my passion for film.”

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Political Scientist Daniel Philpott Begins Research on Forgiveness in Uganda

2012-02-09T13:00:00-05:00

What role, if any, does forgiveness play in the context of war, in the wake of unspeakable atrocities?

Daniel Philpott, associate professor of political science and peace studies at Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, recently returned from Uganda, where he is exploring the practice of forgiveness among survivors of the two-decades-long civil war between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Ugandan government.

This pilot project, funded by the Fetzer Institute, is the first step in what Philpott hopes will be a multi-year research initiative on forgiveness in peacebuilding.

The concept of forgiveness “doesn’t have a lot of status in the international community, including the United Nations, human rights organizations, international lawyers, and diplomats,” says Philpott, an expert on religion and global politics.

“But it has played a role in a number of post-war regions. My hunch was that forgiveness is more commonly practiced than we know, and that it may be flying under the peacebuilding radar in some parts of the world.”

In Uganda, a deeply religious country, the concept of forgiveness “seems to be everywhere,” Philpott says. His project begins as the war has abated and major efforts are underway to reintegrate thousands of refugees and former child soldiers who had been abducted from their villages and forced to kill.

Philpott’s interview subjects included Archbishop John Baptist Odama, leader of the Acholi Religious Leaders’ Peace Initiative, whom Philpott first met at Notre Dame in 2008. Archbishop Odama has publicly encouraged Ugandans to forgive perpetrators of war crimes and to observe traditional rituals of reconciliation.

Others subjects included Anglican bishops and Muslim clergy, district government officials, leaders of local NGOs, and “ordinary people,” including the mother of a girl abducted by the LRA from a Catholic girls school, who struggled for her daughter’s release and for justice while also advocating forgiveness.

“I want to see what the experience of forgiveness is among the war’s victims,” Philpott says. “Is it practiced widely or just among a few heroes? Is it practiced with difficulty, with controversy? Are there disputes around it, is it imposed, or does it resonate with what people believe? Do people flourish around it?”

In Uganda, Philpott received assistance from Stephen Oola, a graduate of the Kroc Institute’s master’s program in international peace studies, who is head of research and documentation for the Refugee Law Project, a legal advocacy organization for refugees and displaced people.

Philpott is the director of the Program on Religion, Reconciliation and Peacebuilding at Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. His book Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press as part of the Kroc Institute’s “Studies in Strategic Peacebuilding” series.

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Photos courtesy of Jason Cohen

Psychologist Mark Cummings Studies How Political Violence Impacts Children

2012-02-09T10:00:00-05:00

Political violence and the aftermath of war are known to be harmful to children’s and teens’ mental health and well-being, but until now, few studies have examined how this happens.

A new longitudinal study of neighborhoods in Belfast, Northern Ireland, led by University of Notre Dame Psychology Professor Mark Cummings, has found political violence affects children by upsetting the ways their families function, resulting in behavior problems and mental health symptoms among the youths over extended periods of time.

“Our findings suggest that working with families in communities affected by political violence may have long-term benefits for children in those families,” according to Cummings.

The study, in the journal Child Development, was a collaboration among researchers at Notre Dame, Catholic University of America, Queen’s University Belfast, and the University of Ulster.

Funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the study involved some 300 families living in segregated, socially deprived neighborhoods in Belfast, in neighborhoods that ranked low on measures of income, health, education, proximity to services, crime, and quality of life. Mothers and children filled out surveys annually for three years, addressing such factors as how their families functioned, children’s emotional and behavioral responses to conflict in the home, and how much they knew about antisocial behavior in the community. Antisocial behavior included, for example, blast bombs or petrol bombs exploded by members of another community or someone beaten by people from another community. Researchers also recorded the number of politically motivated deaths in families’ neighborhoods as an index of political violence.

The study found a link between historical levels of political violence, and current reports of conflict and violence in the community. Awareness of community conflict and violence between Catholics and Protestants was related to higher levels of family conflict a year later. Children who experienced family conflict as a result of political violence reported greater emotional insecurity about family relationships, which also resulted in more mental health symptoms and behavior problems over time.

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Originally published at newsinfo.nd.edu.

Economist Kirk Doran Shows How Communism's Collapse Changed Mathematics in the U.S.

2012-02-07T16:00:00-05:00

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992 brought an influx of Soviet mathematicians to U.S. institutions, and those scholars’ differing areas of specialization have changed the way math is studied and taught in this country, according to new research by University of Notre Dame Economist Kirk Doran and George Borjas from Harvard University.

Titled “The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Productivity of American Mathematicians,” the study will appear in an upcoming edition of the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

“In this paper, we examine the impact of the influx of renowned Soviet mathematicians into the global mathematics community,” says Doran.

“In the period between the establishment and fall of communism, Soviet mathematics developed in an insular fashion and along very different specializations than American mathematics. As a result, some mathematicians experienced few potential insights from Soviet mathematics after the collapse of the Soviet Union, while other fields experienced a flood of new mathematicians, theorems and ideas.”

Between the rise and fall of communism in the Soviet Union (1922-92), there was little collaboration and were few exchanges between Soviet and Western mathematicians. In fact, any communication with American mathematicians was read by authorities and special permission was needed to publish outside the Soviet Union.

“Just as speakers of one language, when separated geographically for many generations, develop separate and different dialects through natural changes over time, so Western and Eastern mathematicians, separated by Stalinist and Cold War political institutions, developed under different influences to the point of achieving very different specializations across the fields of mathematics,” according to Doran.

Results of the study suggest that the sudden shift in specialized areas not only was related to a decline in the productivity of American mathematicians whose areas of specialty most overlapped with that of the Soviets, but it also reduced the likelihood of a competing American mathematician producing a top research paper.

Similarly, marginal American mathematicians became much more likely to transfer to lower ranked institutions and to significantly reduce their research and scholarship. There also is evidence in the study that the students of Soviet émigrés had higher lifetime productivity than students from the same institution whose advisers were non-Soviet émigrés.

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Originally published at newsinfo.nd.edu.

Psychologist Cindy Bergeman Studies Aging and Resiliency

2012-02-07T16:00:00-05:00

In an early job as a social worker for senior citizens, Cindy Bergeman began to wonder: Why did some of the people she worked with have such a positive attitude while others seemed so dreary? When faced with adversity or stress, why did some weather the storm better than others?

Bergeman, now a professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Psychology, has spent more than two decades pursuing the answers to those questions.

As a developmental psychologist, her research focuses on investigating patterns of variability and change in physical and psychological health across the lifespan and identifying the genetic and environmental factors that may influence that process.

Her major project is a decade-long investigation called the Notre Dame Study of Health and Well-Being, for which she recently received two grants totaling $3.3 million.

Taking the Long View

When complete, the study will provide some of the most detailed information to date about human beings’ ability to deal with stress and adversity throughout life, and the impact that has on physical and mental health.

“It’s a tremendous amount of data,” Bergeman says. “We’re bringing together a lot of very interesting threads of research into a single study that will allow us to get a snapshot of people and to follow their lives over time.”

The National Institute on Aging (NIA), which helped launch the study five years ago, has now awarded Bergeman $3.1 million, five-year grant to continue work on the project, while a new, $200,000 grant from the John Templeton Foundation will fund related research looking at the role of spirituality and religion in dealing with stress.

The Notre Dame Study of Health and Well-Being started in 2006, looking at subjects age 60 to 75 from a five-county area of Northern Indiana. It had three components.

Each year, participants filled out a 50-page questionnaire that asked about a subject’s personality, stressors, social support, and physical and mental health.

In years one, three, and five, participants also filled out a daily diary for 56 days that asked questions about daily hassles or events, what type of good or bad things happened, and how the person dealt with them.

In years two and four, Bergeman and her colleagues interviewed a subsample of the participants and asked them to share their life stories, including turning points such as the loss of a spouse or child, and how they were affected by them.

Expanding the Scope

Bergeman determined early on, however, that the study would not be complete without research involving a middle-age cohort.

“It’s a lifetime of developing strategies that allow you to deal with adversity,” she says.

Bergeman sought and received additional funding from NIA in the second year of the study to add subjects age 40 to 59. With NIA’s latest grant, she will continue with the existing group of midlife and older participants and now add a cohort of younger people age 18 to 40.

When complete, the study will include 10 years of data on older participants, nine years on the midlife cohort, and five years on the younger subjects. In all, there will be almost 1,000 subjects.

Bergeman’s co-principal investigators on the NIA grant at Notre Dame are Matthew A. Fitzsimon Chair of Psychology Scott Maxwell, William K. Warren Foundation Professor of Psychology Scott Monroe; John Cardinal O’Hara, C.S.C., Associate Professor of Psychology Gitta Lubke; Nancy O’Neill Collegiate Chair in Psychology Jessica Payne; and Assistant Professor Michelle Wirth. Former post-doctoral fellow Anthony Ong (Cornell University) and former colleague Steve Boker (University of Virginia) are consultants.

On the Templeton grant, Bergeman will work with graduate student and co-principal investigator Brenda Whitehead.

That grant will fund collection of health data—including reviewing medical records, performing physical exams, and collecting blood from some participants—in order to get a better sense of their physical health. The research team will then compare that information with data from the 10-year study to help understand the impact of religion and spirituality in participants’ lives.

“We are interested in the variability in the way people have experienced stress, and variability in religious/spiritual experiences and the extent to which those experiences can buffer health,” Bergeman says.

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Conference Offers Contemporary Stories of Holiness

2012-02-03T17:00:00-05:00

A conference at the University of Notre Dame February 5 to 8 will bring together Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, and Buddhists for four days to tell the stories of particularly admirable men and women from their respective faiths and traditions.

Stories of Practical Holiness: An Exercise in Interreligious Understanding, convened by the Institute for Church Life (ICL), will include accounts of martyred Trappist monks; of the asceticism and enlightenment of Dharma masters, Buddhist nuns, and Sikh luminaries; of reconciling Israeli Jews and dispossessed Palestinians; and of a contemporary Muslim religious healer.

John C. Cavadini, McGrath-Cavadini Director of the ICL, says that the conference will present concrete examples of holiness from diverse faith traditions not only as a means of deepening interreligious understanding, but also to provide examples of how religious faith drives palpable and conspicuous acts of love, compassion, forgiveness, and reconciliation in contemporary society.

“Admiration is itself a kind of pedagogy,” Cavadini says. “We can look at and admire the lives and witnesses of holy men and women from diverse religious faiths without inviting a sort of religious relativism.”

According to Cavadini, the interreligious dimension of the conference derives in large part from an insight expressed by Pope John Paul II in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth), in which the pope praised the martyrs and saints of the Catholic Church for their “eloquent and attractive example of a life completely transfigured by the splendor of moral truth,” and added that “in this witness to the absoluteness of the moral good Christians are not alone: They are supported by the moral sense present in peoples and by the great religious and sapiential traditions of East and West, from which the interior and mysterious workings of God’s Spirit are not absent.”

Featured speakers at the conference include Dharma Master Hsin Tao; Bhai Sahib (Dr.) Bhai Mohinder Singh Ahluwalia; Rev. Armand Veilleux, O.C.S.O.; Abdolrahim Gavahi, Ph.D.; Dalia Landau; Khader Al-Kalak; and Yehezkel Landau. In addition to sharing stories at the conference, they will visit various Notre Dame theology classes and attend a prayer breakfast with religious leaders and members of the University community.

Conference events are free and open to the public.

“Stories of Practical Holiness” is sponsored by the ICL and the Fetzer Institute.

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Originally published at newsinfo.nd.edu.

Anthropologist Vania Smith-Oka Wins Global Citizenship Award

2012-02-03T15:00:00-05:00

Vania Smith-Oka, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, has been awarded the Center for Public Anthropology’s Ruth Benedict Global Citizenship Award—an honor granted to just one percent of faculty teaching introductory anthropology courses across the United States.

Smith-Oka was recognized for her involvement with the center’s Community Action Project (CAP), an online, interactive academic forum where students from Notre Dame and approximately 60 other universities and colleges share opinions about ethical issues within the field of anthropology.

“Professor Smith-Oka is to be commended for how she takes classroom knowledge and applies it to real-world challenges, thereby encouraging students to be responsible global citizens,” the award committee notes. “In actively addressing important ethical concerns within anthropology, Professor Smith-Oka is providing students with the thinking and writing skills needed for active citizenship.”

Encouraging Young Scholars

CAP students write newspaper-style op-ed pieces on various ethics questions within the field of anthropology and also have an opportunity to evaluate and rank the submissions of other students participating in the project. The Top 20 letters are then sent off to public officials and intellectuals, Smith-Oka says.

Six of the students in her fall 2011 Fundamentals of Social and Cultural Anthropology course wrote opinions that placed in the top 20 out of more than 500 students across the United States and Canada, Smith-Oka says.

And such success is not unusual. In fact, Smith-Oka says, students from Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters “have consistently placed within the Top 20 every time this competition takes place.”

The letters Smith-Oka’s CAP students wrote focused on the concept of human subjects. Specifically, they were asked to consider whether anthropological work should have a different set of ethical guidelines because of the intimate nature of the research and the importance of questions that can be answered through such intimacy.

Smith-Oka says she is proud of her students and honored to have been recognized for her involvement with the project.

“This award validates my teaching,” she says. “It shows that student engagement with issues beyond their comfort zone is possible.”

Recognizing the Marginalized

In her own scholarship, Smith-Oka specializes in medical anthropology and issues of reproduction, motherhood, physician-patient relationships, and access to healthcare for marginalized populations, especially women in the global south.

“I specifically research the ways that large-scale policies for health and/or development shape the experience and lives of mothers,” Smith-Oka says.

“My current research looks at the healthcare delivery for low-income women at an obstetrics ward in a public hospital in Mexico. Through ethnographic research on topics such as perceptions of risk, use and definition of medical space, and violence in birth, I answer questions about how ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mothers are created, managed, and defined.”

Smith-Oka says her research is inspired by a desire to give a voice to low-income women. She is particularly interested in how society’s classification of these women as “bad” mothers shapes their reproductive lives.

“Society’s determination of who fits the norm and who does not is based on arbitrary characteristics,” she says. “I find out how this definition emerges and then how it affects concepts such as good and bad mothers—which ultimately affects how these women are treated by larger institutions, such as healthcare.”

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Historian Brad Gregory's New Book Explores "The Unintended Reformation"

2012-02-03T13:00:00-05:00

How did our world come to be as it is? Examining why and how the West was propelled into its current pluralism and polarization over the long term, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Harvard University Press, 2012), offers new insight into how life in North America and Europe has been shaped over the past five centuries by the Protestant Reformation.

Author Brad Gregory, University of Notre Dame historian, traces the relationships among religion, science, politics, morality, capitalism and consumerism, and higher education from the Middle Ages through the Reformation era to the present.

“Because 16th- and 17th-century Christians could not agree about what was true, right and good, modern individuals were eventually permitted to determine these things for themselves,” Gregory says.

“And as long as most people still continued to agree about basic moral views and political assumptions, despite their religious differences, such politically protected individual freedoms could contribute positively to the robust functioning of a democratic society.”

However, Gregory argues in the book, fundamental disagreements about how we should live and the lack of a shared view of the common good—which is due, in part, to the proliferation of divergent secular and religious views—today tends to cause friction and faction when those freedoms are exercised.

“Basic modern institutions and arrangements solved the problems of religious coexistence inherited from early modern Europe, but they also have created the conditions for the proliferation of intractable societal disagreements that increasingly seem to frustrate the healthy functioning of a democratic political process,” Gregory says.

Prior to the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation sought to advance this vision, but unresolved doctrinal disagreements and religiopolitical conflicts prompted changes in the religious fabric that bound societies together. Virtually all domains of human life were affected.

“One of the book’s arguments is that disciplinary specialization and the fragmentation of knowledge prevent us from seeing important connections among phenomena ordinarily studied separately,” Gregory says.

“The tendency of many historians to concentrate on different types of history—intellectual, social, economic and political—to the exclusion of others diminishes our comprehension of the past. All these types of history must be incorporated because of their combined explanatory power, a corollary of their interrelated historical influence. I have sought to show this in my book.”

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Originally published at newsinfo.nd.edu.

Short Film by Arts and Letters Alumnus Wins Sundance Prize

2012-02-01T12:00:00-05:00

A movie produced and co-written by University of Notre Dame alumnus John Hibey ’05 was awarded the jury prize for short filmmaking at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

The winning film, Fishing Without Nets, tells a tale of a poor, young Somali fisherman who ends up joining a group of pirates.

“By approaching a story of epic scope with an intimate perspective, this visually stunning film creates a rare, inside point of view that humanizes a global story,” the Sundance short film jury said in announcing the prize on January 24.

Going to the Source

Hibey, who was a major in both the Program of Liberal Studies (PLS) and the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre, is a freelance film and video maker in Washington, D.C., where he worked on a number of projects with director and co-writer Cutter Hodierne.

Intrigued by a series of Somali pirate stories in The New York Times, the two men began writing a script together. Eventually, recalls Hodierne, they decided to go to East Africa to learn about pirate life directly from Somali refugees. “John’s just the sort of guy who would do that sort of thing,” he says.

When Hibey and Hodierne left for Mombasa, Kenya, in late 2010, they thought the trip would last about five weeks. They ended up staying three and a half months. And what the two men found there was a world far from their own.

“Nothing could prepare you for the heightened level of our alert system,” Hibey says. “We were constantly at attention.”

Navigating an unfamiliar culture was only part of the challenge in creating Fishing Without Nets, he says. The men cast locals—not trained actors—and they filmed the movie in the Somali language.

Doing so, Hibey says, meant finding people in Kenya who could translate dialogue from English to Swahili and from Swahili to Somali, and trusting that the words actually spoken on film were the ones he and Hodierne intended. To make sure, the men showed their work to a group of immigrants back in Washington, D.C., who call themselves the “Somali Embassy.”

“Attempting to relate ideas through two language barriers is a frustrating yet incredibly creative endeavor,” Hibey says. “We had to learn, in a very quick time, a nonverbal way of communicating. It was a shock and a relief months later when we found from our ‘Somali Embassy’ that everything was going as intended, if not better. The wing and a prayer panned out.”

Building an Audience

The end result, Fishing Without Nets, was one of 64 films selected from a record 7,675 submissions in the 2012 shorts competition at Sundance. This led to an invitation for Hibey to write about the project for The Huffington Post’s “Sundance Diaries” series.

“To tell a Somali pirate story from the perspective of the pirates,” Hibey explains in his first column, “we had to borrow from our cast’s lives, from the stories of the characters we were portraying, and from the stories we had researched prior to our trip to Kenya. In this strange conflagration of real and not real, we found a powerful narrative.”

The buzz around the film only intensified after the award was announced last week, and the team has been meeting with potential backers about returning to Kenya to turn the winning short into a full-length feature.

Whether he is promoting a movie at Sundance, filming in Kenya, writing, acting, or making music videos and commercials, Hibey says he continues to draw on the skills and experiences he developed as a student in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters.

“In both the film program and PLS, we were encouraged to bounce ideas off our fellow students, to expand our knowledge base or creativity before shooting projects or writing pages,” Hibey says. “Cutter and I take a similar creative approach to finding the narrative in Fishing Without Nets.

“For developing a collaborative creative process, those two degrees in tandem, both of which inspired a creative approach to discourse, opened me up to a way of going about my work.”

A Tradition of Success

Hibey is just the latest Arts and Letters alumnus to make an impact at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival.

Peter D. Richardson ’02 won the 2011 festival’s U.S. Documentary Competition Grand Jury Prize for How to Die in Oregon. The film, television, and theatre major’s previous documentary, Clear Cut: The Story of Philomath, Oregon, premiered at the festival in 2006.

Actor William Mapother ’87, who was an English major at Notre Dame, starred in the science fiction drama Another Earth, which won the 2011 festival’s Alfred P. Sloane Prize. The annual award is for an outstanding feature film focusing on science or technology as a theme, or depicting a scientist, engineer, or mathematician as a major character. The film also won a Special Jury Prize in the U.S. Dramatic category for co-writers Mike Cahill and Brit Marling.

Patrick Creadon ’89, a government and international studies major, directed two documentaries selected to compete at Sundance in recent years. His 2006 film Wordplay focused on The New York Times Crossword Puzzle Editor Will Shortz and his dedicated fans. Creadon’s next film, I.O.U.S.A., explored America’s national debt. Film critic Roger Ebert named I.O.U.S.A. one of the five best documentaries of 2008.

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Molly Kinder to Receive Kroc Institute 2012 Distinguished Alumni Award

2012-01-30T13:00:00-05:00

Molly Kinder ’01, who majored in political science and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame, will receive the 2012 Distinguished Alumni Award from the University’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.

Kinder, a native of Buffalo, New York, is director of special programs for Development Innovation Ventures in Washington, D.C., a new initiative at the United States Agency for International Development that funds groundbreaking approaches to global development challenges. Kinder will accept her award from the Kroc Institute in March and also will deliver the keynote address at Notre Dame’s Student Peace Conference.

Before joining USAID, Kinder worked as a senior policy analyst at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C., where she directed the U.S. development strategy in Pakistan initiative. She is the co-author of the report “Beyond Bullets and Bombs: Fixing the U.S. Development Approach in Pakistan” as well as the book Millions Saved: Proven Successes in Global Health, a collection of stories about global health programs that is required reading in more than 60 universities worldwide.

In 2004, when a devastating earthquake struck the northwest region of Pakistan, Kinder was working at the World Bank in in Delhi, India. Two weeks later, she moved to Islamabad to join a team that negotiated a half billion dollar loan to Pakistan’s government for earthquake reconstruction. Later, in the wake of U.S.-led efforts to counter extremism and the military campaign in Afghanistan, she helped create the Center for Global Development’s Pakistan initiative.

Kinder also holds a master’s degree in international development from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. As a graduate student, she was awarded a fellowship to work for the Liberian government as a consultant on poverty issues. She co-authored a policy report on ways to maintain Liberia’s security by economically empowering women. The report earned the Harvard Women and Public Policy Program’s Jane Mansbridge Research Award for best paper in the area of gender and public policy. When Kinder presented the report to Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Liberia’s — and Africa’s — first female president, Sirleaf asked for 500 copies to distribute to policymakers.

As an undergraduate in the College of Arts and Letters, Kinder was active in Notre Dame’s Center for Social Concerns and volunteered in Chile, Kenya, Washington, D.C., Mexico, and Appalachia. She also was the first-ever female member of Notre Dame’s Irish Guard.

Kinder has worked in India and Pakistan as a consultant for the World Bank on poverty reduction, energy, and infrastructure, and has served as a consultant for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She also has served as deputy chair of the nonpartisan Clinton Global Initiative as deputy chair of the organization’s poverty alleviation working group. She is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Truman Security Fellow, and founder of the Truman Women in National Security group.

The Kroc Institute’s Distinguished Alumni Award honors Notre Dame graduates in peace studies whose careers and lives exemplify the ideals of international peacebuilding. Previous distinguished alumni award recipients have included:

Rosette Muzigo-Morrison, Legal Officer with the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in The Hague, The Netherlands (M.A. ’93)
Irene Perurena, Director, International Organizations and Cooperation City of Knowledge/Ciudad del Saber, Panama (M.A. ’91)
Xabier Agirre, Senior Analyst, International Criminal Court, The Hague, The Netherlands (M.A. ’95)
George Wachira, former director, Nairobi Peace Initiative – Africa (M.A. ’91)
Oana-Cristina Popa, former ambassador of Romania to Croatia (M.A. ’96)
Hannah Wu, Human Rights Specialist at the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Bangkok, Thailand (M.A. ’89)
Emil Bolongaita, Technical Director, Management Systems International – Australia (M.A. ’88)

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Political Scientist Michael Desch Awarded Carnegie Planning Grant

2012-01-30T10:00:00-05:00

Professor Michael Desch, chair of Notre Dame’s Department of Political Science, has been awarded a second grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to expand his research on how American scholars can contribute to the formation of U.S. national security policy.

“Not too long ago, it was quite common for academic social scientists to do research that directly influenced national security policymakers,” Desch says. “Indeed, there was a revolving door between the Ivory Tower and the Beltway through which many professors passed regularly to the benefit of both realms.”

But a gap has since opened up between professors and policymakers, he says.

“In this project, I seek to answer three questions,” Desch explains. “First, why is there a gap between the academic and policy worlds? Second, what are its consequences? Finally, what, if anything, should be done to close this gap?”

Scholarship and Policy

The new grant will allow Desch to expand the work he began with the initial Carnegie planning grant he received in 2011. Carnegie Corporation is a philanthropic foundation created by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 to do “real and permanent good in this world.” The organization makes grants to promote international peace and to advance education and knowledge.

Desch’s research will focus on interactions between U.S. scholars and policymakers dating back to the Cold War, when, he says, cooperation between the two was at its peak.

“I am tracing the changing relationship between government and the universities, highlighting its causes and consequences, and suggesting means for achieving a better balance in social science research by scholarly rigor and real-world relevance with particular attention to the field of national security studies.”

He is also connecting this research with his teaching. “For example,” Desch says, “last fall in my U.S. Foreign Policy class, the final paper was a foreign policy platform for one of the presidential candidates in the 2012 election.”

Politics and Religion

Desch specializes in American foreign policy, American national security decision making, and international relations. In addition to his Carnegie-funded research, he co-directs the international relations working group for Notre Dame’s Religion Across the Disciplines initiative with Daniel Philpott, associate professor of political science and peace studies and a faculty member of the University’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.

Funded by a major grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the project calls on leading scholars from around the world to join with faculty and graduate students at Notre Dame to investigate the influence of religion in history, international relations, literature, music, and sociology, as well as the influence those fields have on religion itself.

“This group,” Desch says, “will produce a white paper laying out a future agenda for scholarship on the resurgence of religion—and how it will affect international relations in the future.”

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Department of Music to Celebrate Works of Franz Schubert

2012-01-30T10:00:00-05:00

The University of Notre Dame’s Department of Music will celebrate Franz Schubert’s 215th birthday on Friday, February 3, with an afternoon of music by the famed Austrian composer.

The event, called Schubertiade, will take place from 12:30 to 5 p.m. in the O’Shaughnessy Great Hall and features performances from faculty and students, as well as readings chosen by J.W. Van Gorkom Professor of Music Susan Youens, an expert on Schubert’s work.

The Schubertiade is an open house, and audience members are welcome to come and go as they are able, says Stephen Lancaster, assistant teaching professor in the Department of Music.

“One of the purposes of the event,” Lancaster says, “is to bring music out of the concert hall and into the public thoroughfare to be enjoyed by passersby, as well as those who want to stop and take some moments to listen and hopefully be transported from the daily grind.”

The Department of Music offered a similar concert in January 2011 commemorating the 255th birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

“Schubert’s birth date, January 31, is near the same time as our Mozart Marathon of last year,” says Professor of Music Georgine Resick, “so we decided to vary the proceedings a bit and give our students the opportunity to branch out into different repertoire.”

Schubert composed more than 600 Lieder, or German art songs, and nine symphonies during his short lifetime. He died at the young age of 31 but had a wide posthumous impact, influencing the music of Franz Liszt, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Felix Mendelssohn.

“Our Schubertiade repertoire will include two movements from the Rosamunde string quartet,” Resick says, “a movement from Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata, the complete song cycle Die Winterreise, excerpts from piano sonatas, the entire song collection Schwanengesang presented by the Notre Dame Workshop, and performances of some of Schubert’s more than 600 songs, including choral arrangements presented by the University Chorale and the Glee Club.”

Cookies, coffee, and hot chocolate will also be served at the event, which is free and open to the public.

“People can expect to hear some of the most memorable art songs ever written, as well as beautiful instrumental music, in a relaxed and close environment,” Lancaster says.

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Theologian and Historian Timothy Matovina Discusses Electoral Effect of Latino Vote

2012-01-27T16:00:00-05:00

According to University of Notre Dame theologian and historian Timothy Matovina, “bold proclamations about Latino voters determining presidential elections have become a regular feature of political commentary.”

Matovina, professor of theology and director of Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, is the author of a recent history titled Latino Catholicism: Transformation in America’s Largest Church.

After the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004, the political consultant Dick Morris said that “the biggest reason for Bush’s victory was that he finally cracked the Democratic stranglehold on the Hispanic vote.” In 2008, Martin Kettle, associate editor of the The Guardian, called Latinos “the big racial game-changer” in Barack Obama’s election.

More recently Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress Action Fund posted a piece on the blog of The New Republic called “Why Obama’s Re-Election Hinges on the Hispanic Vote”

“In fact, the electoral significance of Latinos is growing steadily,” Matovina says, “but not as exponentially as such commentaries suggest.”

While many scholars, including Matovina, have reported on the gradual emergence of Latinos as the nation’s largest minority group, Matovina notes that “in the 2008 general elections, eligible African American voters still outnumbered Latinos by five million. Moreover, the majority of Latino voters reside in California, New York and Texas, states in which the results of presidential elections are relatively predictable: the victorious candidate’s margin of victory in these states ranged from nine to 27 percentage points in the two most recent presidential elections.

“The four swing states where Latino votes have the greatest influence are Florida, New Mexico, Nevada, and Colorado, all of which Bush won in 2004 and Obama won in 2008. Of course, in close races the importance of every grouping of voters is magnified. There is not sufficient evidence in such instances to deem Latinos the decisive factor.”

Matovina does acknowledge that the Latino vote is becoming an ever more conspicuous feature of the nation’s political landscape.

“The facts that Obama was the first Democratic presidential candidate to win a clear majority of Latino votes in Florida and that from 2004 to 2008 New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada were the three states with the largest increases in the Latino percentage of the voters who cast ballots reveal the growing significance of Latino voters in presidential elections,” he says.

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Originally published at newsinfo.nd.edu.

Graduate Student Earns Accolades for Research on Cancer Survivors

2012-01-27T10:35:00-05:00

Post-doctoral fellow Errol Philip made history this fall when he became the first two-time winner of a prestigious American Psychological Association graduate student award—just the latest in a long list of accolades.

Philip won the APA’s Division 17 Health Psychology Graduate Student Award for his paper, “Depression and Cancer Survivorship: Prevalence Rates and the Importance of Coping Self-Efficacy in a Sample of Long-Term Survivors." He won the award in 2008 for a paper on quality of life in cancer patients.

He recently completed an internship at Yale University School of Medicine and successfully defended his dissertation at Notre Dame. This past spring, Philip also won the Graduate Student Research Award from the Ethnic Minority and Multicultural Health Special Interest Group at the Society for Behavioral Medicine.

Now in the midst of a two-year, post-doctoral appointment at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Philip credits the supportive environment at Notre Dame for much of his success. During his first year at Notre Dame, for example, Philip was awarded a Zahm Travel Grant to spend the summer at Sloan-Kettering, where he developed relationships with people who were mentors throughout his graduate program and were instrumental in landing his post-doctoral fellowship.

“I don’t think I would be where I am today without some of the support I received from Notre Dame and my mentor, Professor Tom Merluzzi,” Philip says.

A native of Australia, Philip became interested in the psychology of cancer survivors while working with a group that provided support services to cancer patients in Melbourne, where he earned his undergraduate degree in psychology. In 2006, he came to Notre Dame specifically to work with Merluzzi, a professor of psychology who studies coping processes in people with cancer and also serves as director of the College of Arts and Letters’ Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts.

A few years ago, a Notre Dame alumni newsletter featured a story on Merluzzi’s lab and Philip’s research on cancer survivors. “The story made mention of the fact that for many patients, life doesn’t just go back to normal after treatment."

The message resonated strongly with alumni who were also cancer survivors, a number of whom called or sent emails to Merluzzi’s lab in the Department of Psychology. This feedback became the impetus for Philip’s most recent, award-winning research.

The study looked at the rates and predictors of depression in individuals five to 10 years after the completion of cancer treatment. Philip found that even though far removed from treatment, a significant minority of people were reporting symptoms of depression at a rate higher than would be expected in the general population. He also found that people’s confidence in being able to manage the physical symptoms associated with cancer, such as pain and fatigue that continued after treatment, was a very strong predictor of how much depression they reported.

Philip hopes the findings can be used to implement interventions that will help equip survivors with skills that may reduce their chances of experiencing significant depression.

“It is only somewhat recently—as more people are living with a cancer diagnosis—that we are becoming aware of the challenges these individuals face in survivorship,” he says. “It is important that we look at the long-term effects of cancer and its treatment, and how best to assist people in managing these challenges.”

At Sloan-Kettering, Philip will continue his research examining the long-term challenges that survivors face, and the most effective form of support that health professionals can offer them. He is also focusing on the role lifestyle factors play in cancer and identifying what survivors can do to reduce their risk of recurrence or future disease, as well as how health professionals can help promote these efforts.

Merluzzi calls Philip one of his best graduate students and one of the best in the clinical psychology program, in large part due to Philip’s boundless energy and unparalleled work ethic.

“We continue to collaborate on research, though I have trouble keeping up with his productivity,” Merluzzi says. “It is a pleasure to work with a student like Errol, where at some point in the process of mentoring, one stops and admits that the mentoring is mutual.”

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Senior Nicole Shea Researches Autism Therapy

2012-01-27T10:00:00-05:00

Senior Nicole Shea’s love for psychology began in a pool.

“In high school, I worked with children with disabilities by teaching them swim lessons,” Shea says, adding that her desire to find ways to help such children only intensified during her first psychology courses at the University of Notre Dame. “I was just drawn to it.”

Shea started working in the Department of Psychology’s labs even before she declared her major, and she has already contributed to a published paper and conference poster.

She is also one of the first undergraduates named lead therapist in a Social Robot Intervention study in Assistant Professor Joshua Diehl’s Laboratory for Understanding Neurodevelopment (F.U.N. Lab).

Research Motivations

As part of that study, she spent eight weeks this summer working one-on-one with four children with autism to help them develop their communication skills.

“It was a great experience,” she says. “I was surprised how involved I got to be in it but definitely learned a lot through the process.”

Currently, Shea is preparing a senior thesis with the help of Diehl. “I’ve been immersed in research through my time at Notre Dame and thought it would be a good experience to do something on my own,” she says.

Her thesis focuses on the role of parental autonomy in the lives of autistic children.

“Autonomy is basically your sense of control in decision making,” she says. “I want to see how children perceive their parents and teachers—whether or not their parents and teachers allow them to make their own decisions and do things on their own, and how that plays out in their lives.”

Shea says she hopes to help fill what she perceives as a gap in autism research with respect to this area, a goal Diehl believes is within reach.

“For years, therapy for individuals with ASD [autism spectrum disorders] has focused on how to shape their behavior through external motivation,” he says. “Nicole, however, has identified the importance of promoting autonomy, and by extension intrinsic motivation, as a factor that will truly lead to sustainable change in the lives of individuals with ASD.

“For this she will collect her own data and not rely on my data at all,” he says, “and I have no doubt that this will lead to more presentations and papers for Nicole.”

Professional Aspirations

Shea says her undergraduate work has inspired her to pursue an advanced degree in psychology and then work in a clinical or research setting with children who have disabilities.

“I think the opportunities I have had to get involved with research … have been really outstanding,” she says. “I have gained a wealth of experience here at Notre Dame.”

With her experience and dedication, Diehl says Shea can make a real contribution to the psychology community. “She is committed to science but keenly aware of the clinical applications of her work,” he says. “She has always been driven to create novel scientific contributions that aren’t just intellectually interesting, but have a meaningful impact on individuals with disabilities and their families.

“She is intelligent, thoughtful, and truly an exemplar of the mission of the department and the University.”

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Economics Alumna Focuses on Health Policy

2012-01-27T10:00:00-05:00

When she first arrived at the University of Notre Dame, Karen Stockley ’08 had no plan to major in economics and says graduate school wasn’t on her radar either. Today, she is pursuing a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University and already has three years of professional research experience, an award-winning paper to her credit, and a bright future in healthcare economics.

It was a Principles of Economics class during her very first semester, Stockley says, that sparked her interest in the field.

“I really liked the ability to formalize what are very intuitive results,” she says. “The core ideas in economics aren’t overly complicated, and yet having a formal framework to look at problems using these ideas produces surprisingly powerful results.”

Health by the Numbers

In the fall of her senior year, Stockley took a health economics class with Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Economics William Evans and then the following spring took a course he designed to expose students to intensive academic research.

As part of that class, Stockley co-wrote a paper with fellow student Ann Walter on the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, a topic suggested by Evans. The paper went on to win a Bernoulli award in the annual competition sponsored by the Department of Economics to encourage undergraduates to do statistical research worthy of being published in peer-reviewed journals.

“I had read academic papers for other classes, but I hadn’t thought deeply about what was behind the results,” Stockley says. “The project gave me the opportunity to experience the entire research process.”

Building on that experience, she took a job after graduation as a research assistant at the health policy center at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. There, Stockley’s work included quantitative analysis of government surveys and, most significantly, evaluations of the Massachusetts healthcare reform legislation that passed in 2006.

“It was a fascinating time to be working in Washington, those years leading up to the national health policy debate,” she says. “A lot of the elements in the national health law have their foundation in the Massachusetts reform, so there was interest from policy makers and academic researchers in determining its impact. It was exciting to see that my work was immediately relevant to national policy.”

Research for the Real World

It was this work, and the potential to make an impact in the real world, Stockley says, that convinced her to pursue a graduate degree. “It became clear that the only way I could do this as a career was to get a Ph.D. and learn the technical tools I needed to lead projects.

“My years at Urban helped me focus my research interest, and it gave me a lot of institutional knowledge of the healthcare system and what research is really like,” she continues. “The first year of graduate school is very difficult, so it’s important to know why you’re here and what you ultimately want to get out of it. Having worked those years, it’s very clear to me why I’m working this hard right now.”

Stockley also credits Evans as a “big influence” in her career choice.

“His class was the first time I had been exposed to health economics and working with him on the paper was my first exposure to what the research process was like,” she says. “I then kept in touch with him during my years working and when I was applying to graduate school. It was extremely helpful to have him guiding me, thinking about what programs were best suited to me and writing a letter of recommendation.”

Stockley says she plans to continue to focus her research on health economics during in her doctorate program and well into the future. “It encompasses so many different aspects of economics. Health care is about 18 percent of total GNP, approaching 20 percent in a few years.

“That’s one-fifth of the national economy,” she says, “and that’s huge motivation to study and work in this area.”

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Political Scientist Ricardo Ramírez Assesses Romney’s Stance on the DREAM Act

2012-01-26T16:00:00-05:00

Even with the endorsements of three Latinos with strong name recognition in the Latino community, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney could alienate a good portion of Latino voters in Florida with his hardline position on immigration, according to a University of Notre Dame political scientist.

“Florida will be the first ‘winner-take-all’ primary state, and candidates can’t forgo any segment of the Republican electorate,” says Ricardo Ramírez, an associate professor of political science whose areas of expertise include political behavior, state and local politics, and the politics of race and ethnicity.

“Latino Republican voters in Florida complicate the campaign strategies because their views on immigration are more moderate than the rest of the Republican electorate. If the election proves to be close, Latino Republican voters could be the swing vote.”

Ramírez describes Romney’s promise to veto the DREAM Act as his “Meg Whitman” moment. (Many analysts of the 2010 California governor’s race, including Republican strategists, blame Whitman’s loss to Jerry Brown on her hardline stance on immigration, which alienated Latino voters.)

“According to the most recent Latino Decisions poll, 70 percent of registered Latino voters in Florida would be more likely to support a candidate who declared that they would not penalize children who came illegally and would pass the DREAM Act,” Ramírez says. “If more Latino voters learn of Mitt Romney’s stance on the DREAM Act, his 14 point lead over Newt Gingrich could be wiped out,” Ramírez says.

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Originally published at newsinfo.nd.edu.

Mark Roche Honored for Why Choose the Liberal Arts?

2012-01-26T01:10:00-05:00

Former Notre Dame College of Arts and Letters Dean Mark Roche has been named winner of the 2012 Frederic W. Ness Book Award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). The Ness award is given annually to the book that best illuminates the goals and practices of a contemporary liberal education.

Roche’s winning book, Why Choose the Liberal Arts? (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), “outlines the benefits of a liberal education for all students striving for success in today’s tough economy,” says Pomona College President David W. Oxtoby, the Ness Book Award committee chair.

“The book is clearly written, nicely crafted into four thematically organized chapters, well argued in a reasonable and balanced manner, and convincingly supported by a substantial body of research,” Choice magazine states in its May 2011 review of the book. “It will prove valuable reading for anyone concerned with the state of the modern university and the future of liberal arts.”

The prize was presented on January 26 at the AAC&U’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

“I am humbled by the award and elevated that several aspects of a liberal education that are particularly valued at an institution such as Notre Dame—engaging the great questions as an end in itself, forming character, and developing a sense of vocation—have been endorsed in this way,” says Roche, the Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C. Professor of German Language and Literature and a concurrent professor of philosophy.

“Beyond developing the practical and economic value of a liberal arts education, I sought to raise our expectations for higher education today.”

In his book, Roche develops three overlapping arguments for a strong liberal arts education: first, the intrinsic value of learning for its own sake, including exploration of the profound questions that give meaning to life; second, the cultivation of intellectual virtues necessary for success beyond the academy; and third, the formative influence of the liberal arts on character and on the development of a sense of higher purpose and vocation.

“Even if my second chapter, on the practicality of a liberal arts education for future employment and leadership opportunities, may resonate the most with students and their parents, it is important to remember that it is not the only rationale for having such an education,” Roche says. “If we reduce the purpose of education to that of getting a job, we have failed to adorn it with higher meaning. Even more than awakening a deeper meaning in work, a liberal arts education gives graduates a direction for life.”

Finding a vocation begins with the great questions, Roche says. “What is of highest value? What are the most pressing challenges of the age? Who am I? What ought I do with my life? These questions form the core of a liberal arts education.”

And it is through the study of such questions, he says, that liberal arts students develop vital skills in reading, writing, speaking, and critical thinking “that will allow them to flourish, whatever career paths they might choose or life choices they might make over time.”

Roche is the author of seven books, including Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century and The Intellectual Appeal of Catholicism and the Idea of a Catholic University. He also served as dean of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters from 1997 to 2008.

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Quantitative Psychology Professors Honored

2012-01-25T16:00:00-05:00

Three University of Notre Dame psychologists have been recognized for their work to more precisely measure a wide range of research topics, from happiness and depression to educational achievement.

Specialists in the demanding subfield of quantitative psychology, Scott Maxwell, Zahng Guangjian, and Ying “Alison” Cheng design the statistical scaffolding needed to support measurable research into what are some of the most ephemeral of human conditions and concepts.

For a Lifetime of Achievement

Scott Maxwell, the Matthew A. Fitzsimons Chair in Psychology, was awarded the American Psychological Association’s 2010 Samuel J. Messick Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award for “distinguished theoretical or empirical contributions to basic research in psychology.”

The honor came just one year after the association awarded presidential citations to Maxwell and Notre Dame Psychology Professor George S. Howard for “a lifetime of outstanding contributions”—including “developing innovative and novel methodologies such as response-shift and retrospective designs” that have helped psychologists around the world conduct more accurate research.

Maxwell specializes in research methodology and applied behavioral statistics. While he works closely with Howard, he also partners with a number of other faculty members and current and former students.

“I feel very fortunate to have exciting colleagues in the psychology department,” Maxwell says. “It is a lot of fun to brainstorm together and help them think about ways of answering questions.”

His recent research has been focused in two main areas: the role of sample-size planning in psychological research and mediation analysis (studying the underlying causal mechanism by which one variable causes another).

In addition to his research agenda, Maxwell serves as editor for the prestigious Psychological Methods journal and teaches statistics and quantitative psychology courses for both graduate and undergraduate students in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters.

“The most gratifying aspect for me of being a professor is being able to develop students into colleagues and then continue working with them for years or even decades,” he says.

New Approaches to Measurement

Assistant Professor Guangjian Zhang was honored with the 2010 Cattell Early Career Research Award from the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology. The annual prize recognizes a young researcher who “has made significant contributions to the field of multivariate experimental psychology and who shows promise of continued work of a very high quality.”

“This means a lot—I know that people are paying attention to my work,” Zhang says.

The Cattell award was especially gratifying, he says, because a number of his colleagues in the Department of Psychology are past winners. They include 2007 winner Gitta Lubke, the John Cardinal O’Hara, C.S.C., Associate Professor of Psychology; 2002 winner Ke-Hai Yuan, professor of psychology; and 1990 winner Scott Maxwell.

Zhang has spent the last 10 years seeking more accurate measures for abstract variables such as happiness and depression. As part of his research, he employs the Latent Variable Approach, a system in which multiple measurements are synthesized to accurately gauge a transient concept.

“This approach allows us to study a concept which cannot be measured directly, concepts for which we don’t have perfect measures,” says Zhang. “How can we make inferences from the imperfect measures we do have to really examine underlying constructs? I’m working on the underlying framework.”

And Notre Dame is a particularly good place to pursue such challenging questions, he says.

“The quantitative program at ND is one of the largest programs in the country, probably in the world, so I have wonderful tools and wonderful colleagues here.”

Innovative Methods for Educational Testing

Another rising star in the subfield, Assistant Professor Ying “Alison” Cheng, researches educational and psychological measurements, particularly the computerized adaptive testing used in schools.

In 2011, CTB/McGraw-Hill invited Cheng to be the featured speaker at its conference on psychometrics. It also awarded Cheng Innovation Research and Development grants in 2010 and 2011 for her work with Yuan.

“I’m very lucky in receiving this award,” Cheng says, “because funding innovative research takes courage and commitment from these companies. They’re taking risks, in a way, so I really feel blessed. I can try out ideas with adaptive testing, which, in my opinion, is the future of testing.”

Her work is already attracting notice. In 2009, she won the National Council on Measurements in Education’s Bradley Hanson Award, which honors “a substantive contribution to the field of educational measurement.”

Cheng’s research seeks to improve the precision and usefulness of large-scale standardized tests such as the SAT, GRE, and statewide student assessment exams. “A lot of testing is used for big-stakes decision making—whether you can graduate, get into a school, get a degree, etc.,” she says. “If anything is used for high-stakes decisions, you need to guarantee that it’s done right and fair to everybody.”

The testing research, she says, complements the other part of her work at Notre Dame teaching statistics to undergraduates and graduate students. “I am blessed to be in a very supportive and collegial environment, which is essential to sustaining high productivity,” she says.

“My research focuses on issues in education,” she says, “so I feel that my passion for research and my passion for teaching come together in perfect unity.”

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Notre Dame Professor Honored for Environmental-Justice Work

2012-01-25T15:00:00-05:00

By now, most people are aware of the environmental effects of air or water pollution; University of Notre Dame philosopher and scientist Kristin Shrader-Frechette has devoted herself to bringing to light a less known concern, the inequitable distribution of pollution’s human toll.

“Polluters ‘target’ poor and minority communities to locate noxious facilities because they know that residents often are unable to defend themselves,” she says.

For her efforts, Shrader-Frechette was recently awarded the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award from Tufts University’s Institute for Global Leadership. The honor recognizes her lifetime body of work, including research and pro bono service related to both global public-health problems and pollution-related environmental justice.

Shrader-Frechette, O’Neill Family Professor of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Letters and a concurrent professor of biological sciences in the College of Science, says she sees the Mayer award as an opportunity to get the word out about environmental justice, an issue that remains poorly understood by the general public. Many are often shocked, she says, to discover that race and class can play a role in exposure to pollution and the resulting impact on individual health.

Protecting Children

Each year, Shrader-Frechette and her team of student researchers conduct as many as 12 pro bono projects, producing health-risk assessments in low-income or minority communities that typically don’t carry enough political heft to keep out polluters or contain their excesses.

“Frequently our work begins,” she says, “after I receive a phone call from someone who says, ‘Many of our children are getting sick, and we think the pollution here is one of the reasons for their illnesses.’”

For example, Shrader-Frechette recalls working with a group of Notre Dame students at a housing project on the South Side of Chicago, where, she says, “dozens of children had been born with cancer.”

Her research suggested that cancer cluster could be partly attributed to the toxic-waste dumps that surrounded the projects. “Finally, those housing units are being closed and the residents are being moved to a safer area,” she says.

Pollution effects on children have always concerned Shrader-Frechette the most, she says, “because children are completely dependent on us to make the world safe for them.” And the impact of pollution on children can be especially devastating.

“If pollution interferes with their physical and neurological development, children will bear the burden of environmental injustice forever.”

Empowering Communities

Environmental-justice investigations have taken Shrader-Frechette and her Notre Dame students sometimes quite far afield, reviewing the health effects of a toxic-waste dump in a Latino community in Kettleman City, Calif., or examining the impact of radiation releases from a nuclear facility near an African-American community in Louisiana.

Her research teams then produce detailed assessments about health threats. These reports, she says, in turn empower the members of the affected communities so they can, for example, “force noxious facilities to clean up and obey the law.”

Shrader-Frechette says she is impressed and gratified by the commitment and energy of her students.

“Notre Dame is an amazing place,” she says. “I don’t know of any other university that does what we do here, probably because no other university has such a critical mass of students who are both brilliant and scientifically astute, as well as committed to social justice.”

Providing Science

Shrader-Frechette, who received her Ph.D. in philosophy of science from Notre Dame, also has a mathematics degree, as well as three post-docs, in biology, economics, and hydrogeology. She has written 16 books, most recently What Will Work: Fighting Climate Change with Renewable Energy, Not Nuclear Power in 2011. In 2004 she became only the third American and the first woman to win the World Technology Award in Ethics. In 2007, Catholic Digest named her one of 12 “Heroes for the U.S. and the World.”

The Church’s preferential option for the poor is a prime motivation for her work, Shrader-Frechette says, and a personal inspiration is the martyr Ignacio Ellacuría, S.J., a liberation theologian. As rector of the University of Central America in El Salvador, he advocated for peace and justice during the country’s long civil war and spoke out against oppressive socioeconomic conditions. But activism proved deadly for Ellacuría, who was murdered in 1989 by a military death squad, along with five Jesuit colleagues, their housekeeper, and her daughter.

In a 1982 address at Santa Clara University, Ellacuría said that a truly Christian university must take into account the gospel preference for the poor— to be a voice for those who are prevented from promoting their legitimate rights and “to provide science for those who have no science.”

“We often call our work ‘liberation science,’” Shrader-Frechette says, “because we try to use science and ethics to help free vulnerable people from life-threatening, environmentally unjust burdens.”