Tag: Halmos College of Arts and Sciences

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.

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.

“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.