Tag: Halmos College of Arts and Sciences

Art + Design Majors Named ‘Students to Watch’ By Magazine

Vivian Duran

Sol Santecchia

Vivian Duran and Sol Santecchia, Art + Design majors in the Department of Communication, Media, and the Arts in the Halmos College of Arts and Sciences, were recently named “Students to Watch in 2021” by Graphic Design USA (GDUSA) magazine.

“It is certainly an achievement for our students to gain this national recognition,” said Miriam Ahmed, Ph.D., assistant professor of graphic design for the Department of Communication, Media, and the Arts. “GDUSA is a widely recognized publication in the industry, and having our students featured in the magazine demonstrates to the field that our NSU graphic design students are on par with students from top design schools across the country. As we promote and grow the Art + Design program, accolades earned by our outstanding students are indicators of the caliber of talent recruited into our program and their successful career trajectories.”

The magazine’s April 2021 issue also added Nova Southeastern University to GDUSA magazine’s compilation of “Highest Honors: Top Graphic Design Schools.”

“I am so proud of our outstanding Art + Design students and faculty,” said Shanti Bruce, Ph.D., professor and chair for the Department of Communication, Media, and the Arts. “They have worked hard, and this is a well-deserved honor.”

Check out the magazine feature!

Learn more about the Graphic Design concentration offered through the B.A. in Art + Design program.

WCC Undergrad’s Short Documentary Wins First Place

Janay Joseph, NSU Writing and Communication Center (WCC) undergraduate consultant, and Halmos College of Arts and Sciences history and international studies major, won first place for her short documentary “She Had a Dream: Eula Johnson’s Fight to Desegregate Broward County” at the Undergraduate Student Symposium (USS), hosted by the Farquhar Honors College April 6-8, 2021.

Janay Joseph

Joseph’s “She Had a Dream” began as a short video project for her internship with History Fort Lauderdale, who helped produce the film along with her internship supervisor, Tara Chadwick. Joseph’s film focuses on Eula Johnson, a Civil Rights activist who led the Wade-ins protest on Fort Lauderdale Beach and became the first woman president of the NAACP Broward Chapter. Joseph’s video focused on Johnson’s story in an effort to inform others of her work as a Civil Rights activist, which led to the desegregation of Broward County Schools and other public facilities.

“I found her story inspiring since she was fearless in fighting for the rights of African-Americans including those outside of her community in Sistrunk,” she said. “With the recent Black Lives Matter protests it shows that a lot of the same issues she was fighting for in the past are still the struggles that Black people go through today. In a way, it links her past to our present. It was an honor to take first place and to see that her story resonated with so many people.”

NSU’s annual USS features and celebrates undergraduate student scholarship through poster displays, oral presentations, films, and performances. Representation in the USS often leads students to further research and publication, and presentation opportunities at both local and national conferences and conventions.

Watch Joseph’s “She Had a Dream: Eula Johnson’s Fight to Desegregate Broward County.”

Learn more about the NAACP Broward Chapter.

Learn more about the Undergraduate Student Symposium.

https://honors.nova.edu/student-symposium/index.html

Learn more about the NSU Writing & Communication Center.

 

Halmos Alumna Presents with Faculty at DRC Conference

Storrow

Georgakopoulos

Rebecca Storrow, Ph.D., graduate of the doctoral program in the Department of Conflict Resolution Studies (DCRS) in the Halmos College of Arts and Sciences and the Guy Harvey Oceanographic Research Center (HCAS); Harold Coleman, J.D.; and Alexia Georgakopoulos, Ph.D., faculty in DCRS presented at the 29th Annual Dispute Resolution Center’s Conference, held virtually in August 2021.  The conference theme was “Bringing People Together.” Their presentation was titled “The Craft of Mediation: Effective Strategies that also Support Diversity and Inclusion.”

Storrow is a regional vice president with the American Arbitration Association (AAA) in Miami, managing large commercial arbitration and mediation cases. Coleman is senior vice president for mediation at the American Arbitration Association (AAA), and mediator/executive director for AAA Mediation.org.

Georgakopoulos’ research and teaching interests include mediation, facilitation, and workplace bullying. She is the faculty adviser to the Conflict Resolution Community of Practice Working Group in DCRS.

Halmos Chemist Publishes International Paper on Symmetry

Russell Driver, Ph.D.

This year, chemistry faculty Russell Driver, Ph.D. collaborated with researchers at KAIST in South Korea (KAIST). Part of Halmos College, Driver’s research focused on the structural elucidation of self-assembling organic materials and the processes that influence nanoscale symmetry selection.

For this paper, published in Small – Wiley Online Library, Driver solved the single crystal X-ray structures of many of the folders in the paper which was published on the inside front cover.

With a 2020 Journal Impact Factor of 13.281 (Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate Analytics, 2021)), Small continues to be among the top multidisciplinary journals covering a broad spectrum of topics at the nano- and microscale at the interface of materials science, chemistry, physics, engineering, medicine, and biology.

Halmos Faculty Presents on Understanding Family Violence

Judith McKay

Judith McKay, J.D., Ph.D., director of the doctoral program, and faculty in the Department of Conflict Resolution Studies (DCRS) in the Halmos College of Arts and Sciences and the Guy Harvey Oceanographic Research Center (HCAS), presented at the 29th Annual Dispute Resolution Center’s Conference, held virtually in August 2021.  The conference theme was “Bringing People Together.” McKay’s presentation was titled “Creating Safer Communities: Understanding Family Violence and the Effects on Communities and Organizations.”

McKay is the faculty adviser to the Social Justice Roundtable and works with students in the community through Community Resolution Services, a practicum and volunteer site for DCRS. Community Resolution Services hosts Story Café, We Love our Families series, The Women’s Roundtable, and is involved in offering workshops for the county’s Crisis Intervention Teams, and other events for community groups and organizations.

McKay’s scholarly interests include conflict coaching, strategic community planning, and violence prevention and intervention in family, neighborhood, and organizational conflicts.  For more information about Community Resolution Services, please contact McKay at mckayj@nova.edu.

Halmos Faculty Presents at Distance Learning Conference

Santanu De, M.Sc., Ph.D., faculty in the Department of Biological Sciences in the Halmos College of Arts and Sciences and the Guy Harvey Oceanographic Research Center (HCAS), presented a 30-minute talk at the Florida Distance Learning Association (FDLA) Conference 2021 held virtually from September 29 through October 1, 2021.

The theme of the conference was “Emerging with New Digital Potentials.”  The title of De’s presentation was “Key Strategies for Effective Pedagogy and Assessment of College STEM Courses Online during COVID-19.”  De collaborated on and co-presented this interdisciplinary project with Georgina Arguello, Ed.D., faculty at NSU’s Fischler College of Education and School of Criminal Justice.

De’s research interests include, STEM education, pedagogy, reproductive physiology, developmental biology, cell biology, and protein biology.

Halmos College Research Explores Mind-Altering Parasite

Research has shown how hyena cubs infected with the toxoplasma parasite become bolder in the face of lions, resulting in higher death rates. Commonly found in house cats, Toxoplasma gondii is the parasite that sometimes spreads to humans who handle domestic cat feces and can cause a disease called toxoplasmosis.

Cats aren’t the only animal to harbor the parasite. It’s also found in wild species, including the hyenas inhabiting a remote region of Kenya. These animals are now helping researchers answer longstanding questions about T. gondii’s impacts on wild hosts. In a study published in Nature Communications, researchers from a variety of fields joined forces to look if the parasite impacts the animals’ behavior and survival.

Eben Gering, Ph.D., the co-lead author of the study and Halmos College of Arts and Sciences biology faculty said, “Hyenas turned out to be an excellent model for asking questions about the links between infection and behavior.” Research showed that in hyena cubs, the parasite impacted survival rates. The team found that hyena cubs up to a year old were more likely to be killed by lions if they were infected with the parasite. In fact, all the infected cubs that died were killed by lions. Only 17% of the uninfected cubs died from lion attacks before turning a year old.

Superthin Galaxies Contain Large Amounts of Dark Matter

Examples of blue (EON 32.766 6.667, top) and red (EON 149.150 20.646, bottom) superthin galaxies. The horizontal bar in each panel demonstrates the scale in arcseconds and kpc at the distance of the galaxies.

The thinnest disk galaxies have been studied a long time because of their unusual appearance. Why are they so thin? It is unclear what preserves the disks in this state. These rare galaxies are a mystery.

An international group of astrophysicists, including Halmos College physics faculty Stefan Kautsch, Ph.D., recently published an article on the spectral observations of 138 superthin galaxies (STGs). Using the Dual Imaging Spectrograph on the 3.5m telescope at the Apache Point Observatory located in the Sacramento Mountains in Sunspot, New Mexico, the research group focused on spectroscopic observations of STGs and how those may help explain the resistance of STGs against morphological transformations and disk thickening.

“We discovered that the thinnest spiral galaxies, the so called superthins, contain very big amounts of Dark Matter. It is like this unknown material squeezes the stellar galactic disks in those galaxies into their superthin state,” Kautsch said.

The researchers found that most of the STGs reviewed were dark matter dominated. Their rotational velocity and dark halo mass correlates with galactic color. The blue STGs also have less compact dark halos than the red STGs, whereas the galaxies in both color groups have their halo-to-disk scales ratios under two.

Their results are published in The Astrophysical Journal, published by the American Astronomical Society.

Research Uses Ecology Diversity Analyses in Food Desert Study

“Food Deserts” are usually defined as geographic areas without local access to fresh food. Using community ecology statistics, Halmos Environmental Science alumna Annie Goyanes, ’21 and her faculty adviser J. Matthew Hoch, Ph.D., looked at supermarkets to quantify the availability of healthy food. They tested whether produce diversity is correlated with neighborhood income or demographics. Abundance and diversity of fresh produce was quantified in supermarkets in Broward County.

J. Matthew Hoch, Ph.D.

Their research, conducted while Goyanes was an undergraduate, was recently published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. Their research determined that food deserts should not only be defined by geographic measures, but other influential factors such as diversity and quality of food available. Previous food desert studies often involve lengthy interviews, and/or food index surveys, focus group discussions, administered consumer surveys, and an inventory of food. These methods represent a new application of statistics that have been traditionally used in ecology. This is a quick and easy way to identify gaps in food availability in potentially marginalized communities, which opens an easier path to solving those problems.

This research was supported by a President’s Faculty Research and Development Grant from Nova Southeastern University.

Alumna’s Coral Research Published in Leading Journal

For decades, coral reef ecosystems have been in decline due to a variety of environmental stressors. Considering this decline, coral restoration efforts in the Caribbean have been implemented to promote reef recovery.

In partnership with Norwegian Cruise Line and the Perry Institute of Marine Science, Halmos College of Arts and Sciences marine science alumna Cassie VanWynen ’20 recently published her thesis research. It compares the growth and survival among the acroporid taxa A. cervicornis, A. palmata, and their hybrid, A. prolifera, in three in-situ coral tree nurseries established around Great Stirrup Cay, The Bahamas.

VanWynen is now a research associate in Halmos College’s Coral Reef Ecology with an emphasis on Restoration, Assessment, and Monitoring (CRRAM) housed in the Guy Harvey Oceanographic Research Center. The research in this lab includes investigating the ecology, restoration, and conservation of staghorn coral (Acropora cervicornis) populations. The lab has a strong resource management focus and works closely with local, state, and federal agency resource managers.

For the full journal article at Frontiers in Marine Science.

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