Newsmakers | College of Liberal Arts

Highlighting the professional and academic accomplishments of College of Liberal Arts students, faculty, and staff.

Newsmakers are a quick and easy way to acknowledge the professional and academic accomplishments of RIT students, faculty, and staff, such as publishing an article in a scholarly journal, presenting research at a conference, serving on a panel discussion, earning a scholarship, or winning an award. Newsmakers appear in News and Events as well as the "In the News" section on faculty/staff directory profile pages.

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December 2022

December 2, 2022

Jessica Hardin, assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, has been awarded a $299,000 (AUD) Discovery Grant from the Australian Research Council as a co-investigator with colleagues from LaTrobe University. The project is titled “Pacific Healthcare: Transforming research, policy, and practice.” Focusing on crises of trust related to type 2 diabetes and COVID-19 interventions in the Pacific, this collaborative project aims to examine the social and cultural dynamics of medical (mis)trust in Vanuatu, Fiji, and Samoa.

November 2022

November 30, 2022

Nickesia Gordon, associate professor in the School of Communication; Jonathan Schroeder, the William A. Kern Professor of Communications; and Janet Borgerson, from DePaul University, recently had their research article “Folk and Fantasy: Colonial Imaginations of Caribbean Culture in Mid-Century Calypso Album Cover Art” published in the Howard Journal of Communications.
November 18, 2022

Nickesia Gordon, associate professor in the School of Communication, will receive the Marsha Houston Award at the National Communication Association’s (NCA) 108th Annual Convention in New Orleans, held from Nov. 17-20. The NCA honors the best in scholarly communication each year, presenting awards for outstanding scholarship, teaching, and professional service.
November 14, 2022

Amit Batabyal, the Arthur J. Gosnell Professor of Economics and the interim head of the Department of Sustainability, has been appointed an associate editor of the International Review of Environmental and Resource Economics.

October 2022

October 28, 2022

Andrew Herbert, professor of psychology; Archana Pandurangan, a psychology graduate student; and Cory Merkel, assistant professor of computer engineering, presented a poster on “Eye-tracking while learning Greebles” at the Optica Fall Vision Meeting. They reported progress on a project comparing how humans and convolutional neural networks learn new objects (funded in part by RIT’s ESL Global Cybersecurity Institute).
October 28, 2022

Arianna Giguere, an imaging science Ph.D. student, presented a poster on “Multimodal modeling of driving behavior in the presence of distraction” at the 2022 NSF Research Traineeship Annual Meeting at Virginia Tech. Cecilia Alm, professor of psychology and director of RIT’s AWARE-AI NSF Research Traineeship program, served as a panelist and also presented a poster about RIT’s AWARE-AI NRT program.
October 25, 2022

Jessica Hardin, assistant professor of anthropology, was awarded the Rudolf Virchow Award for her paper “Life Before Vegetables: Nutrition, Cash, and Subjunctive Health in Samoa,” which was published in Cultural Anthropology. The award goes to articles that demonstrate “critical anthropology focus with rich ethnographic data, and best reflect, extend, and/or advance critical perspectives in medical anthropological questions in the general area of global public health.”
October 25, 2022

Kaitlin Stack Whitney, assistant professor of science, technology and society, published a policy brief blog on the new over-the-counter hearing aid rule change from the FDA for the SUNY Rockefeller Institute of Government.
October 24, 2022

Hinda Mandell, professor in the School of Communication, was an invited workshop leader as part of the Rochester Harriet Tubman Bicentennial. She led a “Peace Patch” event on Oct. 8 at the Rochester Museum and Science Center, with Geraldine Howard, the great-great-great-grandniece of Harriet Tubman, in attendance.
October 21, 2022

Rebecca DeRoo, associate professor in the School of Communication, received an American Philosophical Society Grant for researching the art and activism of Mary Kelly at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.