Mason Spirit Fall 2018

MASON SPIRIT FA L L 2018

A M AG A Z I N E F O R T H E G E O R G E M A S O N U N I V E R S I T Y CO M M U N I T Y

thank you

for your service 25 WAY S M A S O N I S M I L I TA R Y F R I E N D LY

W HAT’S U P, D O C S?

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N OT H I N G LOS T I N T R AN S L AT I O N

D O N ’ T B E C AU G H T W I T H O U T YO U R

Above Every Friday on campus is Spirit Friday. Show your support by rocking the Green and Gold or risk getting a Spirit Violation.

Photo by Evan Cantwell

About the Cover Air Force TSgt. Kenneth Johnson was part of the first cohort to enter the Enlisted to Medical Degree Preparatory Program (EMDP2), which Mason runs with the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. Johnson is now in his third year of medical school and will be going into the AF Medical Corps when he graduates in 2020. See page 15 for more information about the EMDP2 Program.

Photo by Evan Cantwell

Green A N D Gold

D E PA R T M E N T S 2 3 4 6 15 36 4 0 42 43

FIRST WORDS FROM OUR RE ADERS A D VA N C I N G M A S O N @MASON M E E T T H E M A S O N N AT I O N INQUIRING MINDS SHELF LIFE A LU M N I I N P R I N T PAT R I O T P R O F I L E

45 C L A S S N O T E S 46 From the Alumni Association President

A L U M N I

PROFILES

44 Tom LeGro, BA English ’98, MFA

Creative Writing ’01 47 Urenna Onyewuchi, BS Electrical Engineering ’05, MS Electrical Engineering ’08 49 Tatsushi Arai, PhD Conflict Analysis and Resolution ’05

Follow us on Twitter @MasonSpirit for alumni news, events, and more.

Become a fan of the Mason Spirit on Facebook for links to photos, videos, and stories at www.facebook. com/MasonSpirit. Check our website for a behind-the-scenes look at the Spirit, more alumni profiles, and breaking news at spirit.gmu.edu.

G E O R G E M A S O N U N I V E R S I T Y: A G R E AT U N I V E R S I T Y O F A N E W A N D N E C E S S A R Y K I N D

F E AT U R E S

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25 Ways Mason Is Military Friendly One out of every 10 Mason students—more than 3,700 in total— is a veteran, a current military service member, or the dependent of one. So it’s no surprise that Mason is recognized by a number of organizations as being one of the most military-friendly universities in the country. It is just one of the ways we are working to be inclusive and accessible.

What’s Up, Docs?

Students in Mason’s 39 doctoral programs are producing a wide array of research in fields ranging from biodefense to statistics. In addition to making their own discoveries, these graduate students are also teaching classes and helping faculty members further their research.

Ancient Text Yields New Understanding For much of his career, Mason religious studies professor Garry Sparks has been piecing together the scattered remnants of a 16th-century text. His team’s translation of that text from the Mayan language of K’iche’ to English and Spanish will shed light on how the first Spanish missionaries shared their faith in the New World in the 1500s.

MASON SPIRIT

Lt. Rosemarie Lombardi, JD ‘15, served as the assistant staff judge advocate for Carrier Strike Group ONE while embarked on the USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70) on a six-month deployment.

Mason welcomed

3,720

freshmen

6%

to campus this fall, a increase over last year.

MORE ON THE WEB When you see this graphic, follow it to the magazine’s website for more: spirit.gmu.edu.

Fall 2018 M A S O N S P I R I T | 1

FIRST WORDS

MASON SPIRIT A MAGAZINE FOR THE GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY COMMUNITY

OUR COMMITMENT TO ACCESS

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eorge Mason University is committed to providing access to excellence—to give the many, not the few, an opportunity to earn a degree from a great research university, regardless of their life circumstances.

Traditional universities were built to accommodate the 18- to 22-year-old full-time, residential student. Yet the majority of today’s students require more flexible forms of education, and that need for flexibility compels us to rethink our basic assump­ tions and make true on our promise of innovation.

One such innovative initiative is ADVANCE, a partnership with Northern Virginia Community College to facilitate seamless tran­sition to Mason and reduce time and cost toward earning a degree. ADVANCE offers a solution to a major challenge in higher education. Eighty percent of com­munity college students nationally say they intend to complete a four-year degree. Yet seven years later, only 15 percent have achieved that goal.

This year, ADVANCE will serve more than 300 students across 21 majors. The initiative is then expected to grow to 50 majors by next year and to more than 6,500 students over the next decade.

We are proud that ADVANCE is drawing national attention as a model of transfer. Yet, to be fair, we haven’t invented anything new. We have simply applied, in a scalable way, best practices experts have been advocating for years: aligned curriculum, strategic commitment, and integrated academic and financial aid advising. Sometimes transformative innovations are not about breakthrough ideas, but about institutional commitment and execution.

Another group with specific needs that we are proud to serve is veterans and military members. Veterans or dependents make up about 10 percent of our student population. Their knowledge, skills, and exper­i­ ences enrich campus life for all Mason students.

Mason has built a reputation as a “military-friendly” university. Our Office of Military Services includes staff from each branch of the armed forces. We have several campus groups for veterans. We established a one-stop resource center that could accommodate a Department of Veterans Affairs counselor, an admissions counselor specializing in military and veteran concerns, and transition counselors who provide academic advising.

Active-duty military personnel will benefit directly from our ongoing efforts to increase our online offerings. Like them, there are tens of millions of working adults in America—and about one million in Virginia alone—whose careers and families could be transformed by a college degree but whose life­ styles don’t lend themselves to a traditional college education. Our public mission of access to excel­ lence must extend to this population.

We continue to make strides according to “traditional” metrics, too. This year we welcomed our largest, most diverse, and most academically prepared incoming freshman class ever. For the first time, minority students constitute more than 50 percent of the freshman class of 3,718. The average SAT score (1218) and GPA (3.70) of the incoming freshmen are both Mason highs. Meanwhile, research expenditures increased 14 percent over last year. And Forbes and U.S. News & World Report rank Mason 49th and 67th, respectively, among public universities nationally.

Mason is proving you can grow in size and stature at the same time—you can establish yourself among the leading research universities in the country while finding innovative ways to provide access to more people. Ángel Cabrera President 2 | FA S T E R FA R T H E R : T H E C A M PA I G N F O R G E O R G E M A S O N U N I V E R S I T Y

spirit.gmu.edu MANAG ING EDITOR Colleen Kearney Rich, MFA ’95 A S S O C I AT E E D I T O R S Priyanka Champaneri, BA ’05, MFA ’10 Rob Riordan C R E AT I V E D I R E C T O R Sarah Metcalf Seeberg SE N I O R CO PY WR ITE R Margaret Mandell A S S I S TA N T E D I T O R Melanie Balog E D I T O R I A L A S S I S TA N T Saige MacLeod CO NTR IBUTO R S Lindsay Bernhards, BA ’18 Mary Lee Clark Damian Cristodero Katherine Johnson Dias Elizabeth Grisham, BA ’02, MA ’12 Danielle Hawkins Nanci Hellmich John Hollis Natalie Kuadey, BA ’18 Buzz McClain, BA ’77 Anne Reynolds Preston Williams Jiaxi Zhang P H O T O G R A P H Y A N D M U LT I M E D I A Evan Cantwell, MA ’10, Senior University Photographer Ron Aira, University Photographer Bethany Camp, Student Photographer Melissa Cannarozzi, Image Collections Manager PRODUC TION MANAG ER Brian Edlinski EDITORIAL BOARD Janet E. Bingham Vice President for Advancement and Alumni Relations Frank Neville Vice President for Communications and Marketing Christine Clark-Talley Associate Vice President for Alumni Relations Mason Spirit is published three times a year by the Office of Advancement and Alumni Relations and the Office of Communications and Marketing. Please log in at alumni.gmu.edu to update your records or email spirit@gmu.edu. For the latest news about George Mason University, check out www.gmu.edu.

George Mason University is an equal opportunity employer that encourages diversity.

FROM OUR READERS

CONNECTING WITH THE PAST

FROM TWITTER

➤I➤ wanted to thank you for your magazine. I’ve been reading it since I got back from overseas in the ’70s. I’m totally disabled and really appreciate any word from my past. When I first started at [Mason], most of my classes were in a local high school. Now, you look so big! Keep up the good work and keep entertaining!

Walter Yokobosky, BS Accounting ’84

DRESS CODE MEMORIES ➤I➤ thoroughly enjoyed Jeff Cawley’s interview in the spring 2018 issue, as well as the letter in your last issue from Doug Nehms, whom I only vaguely remember.

Doug says he did not know of anyone being asked to leave a classroom during the dress code incident. I do.

Hubert M. Cole taught calculus and was the dean of students during that contretemps. James Turley turned up in Professor Cole’s calculus class clad in coat, tie, and kilt. Professor Cole asked him to leave, and several of us went with him. The problem was that, in his capacity of dean of students, Professor Cole had no choice except to follow the ukase issued by Robert Reid, whose tenure, if I recall correctly, was pretty short.

We want to hear from you.

Letters to the editor are welcomed.

Send correspondence to Colleen Kearney Rich, Managing Editor, Mason Spirit, 4400 University Drive, MS 2F7, Fairfax, Virginia 22030.

Or send an email to spirit@gmu.edu.

Ted Remington, BA ’68

New on spirit.gmu.edu In this issue, we highlight the stories of Mason doctoral students. More profiles are available online, including psychology PhD student Melissa Scheldrup, who has twice appeared on National Public Radio programs, and education PhD student Ricardo Sanchez, who traveled to Puerto Rico with Counselors Without Borders.

Political strategist Danny Diaz, BA Communication ’00, recently spoke to Mason students at the Fairfax Campus as part of a weekly speakers series on the 2018 congressional elections. Most recently, Diaz was Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign manager.

Fall 2018 M A S O N S P I R I T | 3

A DVA N C I N G MA S O N

From Wells We Did Not Dig

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t’s said that “we all drink from wells we did not dig; we sit in the shade of trees we did not plant.”

This saying is not only a reminder of what we owe to those who have preceded us; it also suggests the power of farsighted philanthropy to build a better future. People with vision dig wells and plant seed­ lings not just from self-interest, but because they see an opportunity to help others, including generations to come.

The recent death of John Toups, a renowned civil engineer, businessman, and community leader who provided decades of service to George Mason University, is an immense loss. As an early and strong supporter of our engineering school, nursing school, the arts, and other causes, John used his philanthropy to dig wells and plant trees from which we all benefit today. Just a few months before his death, in fact, he and his wife, Nina, committed another $1.5 million to Mason to endow and name an instructional lab where our engineering students will learn their craft for decades to come.

John was among the foremost figures in a group of generous men and women who realized that Northern Virginia needed and deserved its own world-class public university. Two generations of community leaders, which include such names as Colgan, de Laski, Hazel, Dewberry, Peterson, Williams, Volgenau, Schar, and Nguyen, helped build the Mason we know today.

These leaders acted upon their vision of what Mason could be. Today, owing each a debt of gratitude, we build upon the foundations they laid and drink from the wells they dug. The question now is: What foundations will we lay for the generations to follow? What wells will we dig? How will we leave our mark?

The answer is up to each one of us.

Mason has come so far since the small, upstart institution that John Toups and his peers encountered more than 30 years ago. Now it is Virginia’s largest public research university—the place where excellence meets access. It’s exciting to imagine what people might say about Mason 30 years from now, isn’t it?

In life, we accomplish little without standing on the shoulders of others. So, today, I challenge you to do two things: Give thanks for everyone who has brought Mason this far. And consider what you can do to help build the Mason of the future.

Janet E. Bingham, PhD Vice President, Advancement and Alumni Relations President, George Mason University Foundation

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Raise a Glass for Scholarships

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ome loyal George Mason supporters have come up with an appealing way to generate funds for student scholarships.

Mason students are benefitting from sales of a new wine, sold under the Geo. Mason label. While the wine is not an official university endeavor, $3.50 from the sale of each bottle of chardonnay or cabernet will support scholarships.

Producing and marketing the wine is a private effort sparked by members of the George Mason University Foundation Board of Trustees, who have partnered with Mason supporter Emanuele Gaiarin, owner of fine wine distributor Siema Wines. Retailing for $19.99, the wine is found at specialty retailers in Northern Virginia and Mary­ land and can be ordered online at www.geomasonwines. com.

Under the guidance of School of Art associate director Don Starr, Mason graphic design students competed to create the brand and label design as a class project. The winning team, comprising 2017 graduates Christian Inguillo, Andrew Carranza, and Khadija Udaipurwala (each of whom earned a BFA in Art and Visual Tech­nol­ogy), received a $1,000 prize for their cheeky, green sunglasseswearing George Mason concept. Another group of under­ graduates, guided by Jim Van Meer—who teaches for the School of Art—developed the “Invite George” marketing campaign.

After debuting in May at the Alumni Association’s 50th Anniversary Gala, Geo. Mason is off to a great start, with more than 1,500 bottles sold and more than $5,000 raised for scholarships in the first three months.

A pair of bottles would make a great graduation gift, notes Terri Cofer Beirne, BA Government and Politics ’88, a Board of Trustees member who has helped lead the effort. And raising a glass is a tasty way for any Mason alumnus or supporter to help deserving students.

—Rob Riordan

A DVA N C I N G MA S O N

Living, and Giving,

TO HELP MASON’S STUDENT-ATHLETES

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t would be hard to find a pair who represent the heart and soul of George Mason University better than Carolyn and Jay Marsh, BS Business Administration ’73.

Married for 52 years, the couple has worked together for more than four decades in Mason’s Athletics Department, helping hundreds of students-athletes by acting as mentors and de facto second parents.

“The two names most synonymous with George Mason basketball are Carolyn and Jay Marsh,” men’s head coach Dave Paulsen says. “They are the epitome of servant leaders working tirelessly to help support generations of student-athletes.”

Jay arrived at Mason in 1970, shortly after completing his military service. At 6-feet-4-inches, he says, “I decided I could still play basketball at age 26, even though I hadn’t played in four or five years.” Lacking a home gym, the fledgling team played its games at area high schools, with players carpooling to games in their own cars. Eventually the team moved into “the old P.E. Building,” which opened in 1972.

After graduating, Jay soon found himself as the part-time assistant basketball coach at his new alma mater.

By 1976, he had become the business and equipment manager, and in the four decades since, he has been a key part of every major step forward for Mason Athletics, from opening the Field House in 1981, to building the Patriot Center (now EagleBank Arena), to the famed Final Four run in 2006.

Carolyn Marsh joined Jay in the Athletics Department in 1975—though in an unpaid position, at first. She has been here ever since, primarily as the administrative assistant for the men’s basketball program. Unofficially, she is viewed as a second mom by players and former players, who regularly stay in touch and come back to see her.

Recently, Jay has been focused on directing the renovation of the basketball team locker rooms and facilities at EagleBank Arena. In support of that effort, earlier this year he and Carolyn decided to commit $50,000 to establish a giving challenge aimed at friends and alumni of the men’s and women’s basketball teams.

Their challenge, which has raised more than $55,000 from other gifts so far, continues through December 31.

In thanks, the men’s basketball film room will be named in honor of Carolyn Marsh.

Some might consider retirement after more than 40 years at one institution. “I mentioned retiring to my friend Stephen Neal [a fellow basketball alumnus],” says Jay. “He told me, ‘Why retire? You have no idea how many people you’ve affected. You’re still impacting so many lives. You might miss that.’”

CAROLYN AND JAY MARSH: Changing lives by giving to Mason Fall 2018 M A S O N S P I R I T | 5

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Twice as Nice

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A steady thrum and a cave-like chill announce the newest addition to the Peterson Family Health Sciences Hall on the Fairfax Campus. This summer, the university installed a new Siemens Prisma high perfor­ mance 3 Tesla (3T) whole body magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. The new multidisciplinary research tool was made possible with a grant from the National Science Foundation and on-campus support from Mason’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Volgenau School of Engineering, College of Health and Human Services, and Office of Research.

meet the

NEW DEAN

ANN ARDIS became the dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences in August. She came to Mason from the University of Delaware, where she was senior vice provost for grad­ uate and professional education. Her research areas include turn-ofthe-20th-century British literature and culture, modernist studies, and the metamorphosis of print culture. She earned BA degrees in English and political science from the University of Kansas and an MA and PhD in English from the University of Virginia.

Mason’s Autism Support Initiative Helps Students Help Themselves

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ociology major Jacquelyn Keaney was so happy she almost cried. Her mentee, a George Mason University student with autism, was at an event on the Fairfax Campus, on her own, and speaking with a group of fellow students.

“I was so proud of her that she had taken an interest in an event that wasn’t planned and wasn’t part of her routine,” says Keaney. “That showed progress.”

Mason is the only university in Virginia to offer a formal support program for students with autism, according to ideastation.org. Mason also was ranked third nationally for students with autism by collegechoice.net.

The goal is to help students help themselves through guidance and learning, says MASI program coordinator Christopher Williams.

Learning strategists focus on academics. They facilitate their mentees’ interactions with professors and help them It is the kind of progress for which the Mason Autism Sup­ connect with Career Services and other campus resources. port Initiative (MASI) strives. Established in 2014 by Linn Jorgenson, then University Life’s associate dean of students, “It’s a program that cuts down on our mistakes and blos­ MASI is a comprehensive program that provides intensive soms new traits out of our character,” says computer support services to students on the autism spectrum game design major Justin Boachie, who is working on beyond the typical higher education accommodations. understanding and respecting social boundaries.

Enrolled students are paired with a peer mentor to help Sophomore Tyler Wrenn, who is majoring in informa­tion them socially acclimate to campus, and a learning technology, says he is working with his learning strategist strategist—a graduate student or professional who sup­ on managing his time. “This program has been really ports the student’s academic, time management, and good for me because it has helped me organize things organizational skills.

I could not organize before, such as my schedule.”

“It’s nice having a friendly environment,” says sopho­more —Damian Cristodero Alex Redding, who is majoring in cyber security engi­ neering. “It’s a safe haven you can go to.”

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MASON’S SATELLITE DISH GETS A MAKEOVER

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ason electrical and computer engineering professor Peter Pachowicz got a call last winter that a 27-year-old, 30-foot satellite dish on the Fairfax Campus was going to be demolished—unless he wanted it.

“If we didn’t take it, it was headed to the scrap yard,” he says. Pachowicz looked for help from the Volgenau School of Engineering’s longtime corporate partner CACI, a provider of information solutions and services, including satellite engineering and space operations.

Thanks to a donation from CACI, Pachowicz is currently working on renovations, a maintenance plan, and a portfolio of student projects.

“Without CACI’s support, this mission would not be possible,” he says. A new dish of this size would cost $1.2 to $1.3 million.

The dish, which he dubbed Space Communications Ground Station, or SpaceCom, will be used to receive signals, data, and images from satellites, as well as signals from missions to the moon. It will also serve as a platform for hands-on student projects, including senior design projects and student club activities.

When the updates are complete, “the dish will be the largest satellite dish in the Washington, D.C., area available to undergraduate students,” Pachowicz says.

CACI chief operating officer John Mengucci says, “This satellite dish represents a unique opportunity for CACI engineers to join forces with Mason students and faculty as they explore the outer limits of what is possible.”

“Without CACI’s

support, this mission would not be possible.” ­­—Peter Pachowicz

—Nanci Hellmich

Fall 2018 M A S O N S P I R I T | 7

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Rocket Men

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ason’s new Rocketry Club captured first place in the target altitude event and third in the sounding rocket event at the Battle of the Rockets competi­tion in Culpeper, Virginia. This was the group’s first time participating in the competition.

“We were surprised that we won an event at our first competition,” says computer engineering major Alex Maxseiner, president and founder of the club.

The objective of the event was to fly a rocket as close as possible to the targeted altitude of 1,312 feet. The club got three shots at reaching that goal; scoring was based on the team’s best two attempts. Mason’s team fell short by only 115 feet in their best two shots.

“The challenge is keeping the altitude consistent between launches be­cause of the wind and other factors,” Maxsei­ner says. “There’s a lot of stress because you want your rocket to per­form, and any error in the launch could result in making repairs with a limited amount of time.”

The club members built two rockets this academic year and had several practice launches before the compe­ti­tion. Maxseiner founded the club in 2016 so he and his peers could get hands-on experience using the infor­mation they were learning in their classes.

“I thought this was a cool application of it,” he says. “We all like space.

I am considering working in the space industry when I graduate.”

—Nanci Hellmich

Mandela Grandson Comes to Mason

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or Siyabulela Mandela, Mason’s School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (S-CAR) was the only place he felt he could continue the legacy of his late grandfather, Nelson Mandela, fighting for freedom and justice.

“As far as my profession is concerned, Mason is known as one of the leading universities in peace research,” says Mandela. “Even my perspectives in conflict resolution have been shaped by scholars from S-CAR. That’s how I ended up here. There was no other place.”

This is Mandela’s first trip to the United States. He is a visiting scholar at S-CAR, working on his PhD disserta­tion, “Preventative Diplomacy and Conflict Prevention in Africa.”

His research, he says, is influenced

by Mason professors he studied as an undergraduate at Nelson Mandela University at Port Elizabeth in Eastern

Cape, South Africa, where he is on the faculty as a lecturer in peace studies.

“I am trying to find innovative ways of resolving conflict in Africa. What I seek to understand is why these conflicts continue irrespective of all forms of trying to solve them. I have reached a conclusion, which I am here to work deeper on: The conflicts continue because most conflicts in Africa revolve around issues of basic human needs.”

Mandela says it was the legacy of his grandfather that drew him to the field of conflict resolution. “I want to experience an Africa that is at peace with itself.”

—Buzz McClain, BA ’77

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Mason welcomed

3,139

transfer students this fall, a

25%

increase from three years ago.

POINT OF PRIDE Mason is one of only

WGMU’s first female GM

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riminology, law and society major Sasha Toophanie loves music and radio, so, as a fresh­man, she joined WGMU. She started at Mason’s student-run station as an assistant to the music director. Two years later, she made some history when she was named WGMU’s first female general manager.

As general manager, Toophanie has new respon­ sibili­ties, such as consulti­ng with faculty advisor Rodger Smith on the station’s direction and man­ agement, being in charge of the station’s daily operations, and over­seeing all execu­tive staff members.

Smith, WGMU’s faculty advisor since 1994, says that Too­phanie’s leadership will benefit the orga­ nization. “I see Sasha being a catalyst to grow our content and popularity on campus.”

11 universities to have its

Toophanie has excelled at every job she has had at WGMU, serving as music director and program director prior to taking on her current role.

“The transition has brought more laughter than heart­ache,” Toophanie says. “If anything, I’ve placed pres­sure on myself to ensure that my leadership will open doors for women involved who may want to be general manager in the coming years.”

Including those who, like herself, aren’t looking for a career in the field. As Toophanie says, her time at WGMU brought her a creative and leadership oppor­ tunity outside the obligations of her degree.

health informatics master’s degree program accredited by the Commission on Accreditation for Health Informatics and Information Management Education (CAHIIM), and it is the only accredited program in the Washington, D.C., area.

“I believe it’s important to be a well-rounded student and not limit yourself to opportunities that are seen as just being for a particular major,” says Toophanie.

“Anyone can lead if they have passion and drive.”

—Natalie Kuadey, BA ’18 Fall 2018 M A S O N S P I R I T | 9

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Student Apartments 1977-2018

This summer Mason lost one of its best-loved, most recognizable landmarks with the demolition of the Student Apartments. The Student Apartments opened in October 1977 and were the university’s first on-campus housing. They were removed this summer as a part of the Core Campus Project, which will replace Robinson Hall A and B with a state-of-the-art, six-story, 218,000-square-foot academic building. Many alumni shared their memories of life in the Student Apartments on social media.

For more information about the history of the Student Apartments, visit bit.ly/gmuapts.

MELISSA HURT, BA THEATER, ’98 NO!!!!!! I lived in the apart­ ments for two years and absolutely loved it! It also really prepared me for sharing an apartment after college that I had to pay for myself. Those two years of real-life learning how to ask your roommate to pick up her stuff, clean the stove, shut her door if she’s going to play music while I study, etc. were really important!

Oh, so sad. I loved those apartments.

BARRY BYLUND I remember the many parties and shenanigans that happened once these were opened! It’s another change going down in the books.

JEN SHELTON, BS PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION ’94 Goodbye @GeorgeMasonU student apartments @MasonHousing you served us well, remembering my summer ‘92 and senior year ‘93-’94 living here.

SCOTT HINE, BS BUSINESS ’95

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PHOTO BY EVAN CANTWELL

What are you doing with the bricks as I would like one or two? My wife and I (not married at the time) lived in the apartments and would love a memento.

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Recent Mason graduate Ingrid Roque-Oviedo (center) poses with her sister Rosa Roque and her mother Maria Elena Oviedo.

Mason and EIP: A Family Tradition

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hen Ingrid Roque-Oviedo, BS Health Administration ’18, graduated from Mason in May, she followed in the footsteps of her five older siblings. Ingrid is the last of Maria Elena Oviedo and Asension Roque’s six children to have completed Mason’s Early Identification Program (EIP) before going on to graduate from Mason.

More than 20 years ago, Maria Elena Oviedo heeded a friend’s advice and enrolled her oldest child, Janet Oviedo, in EIP in 1995. In 2006, Janet became the first of Oviedo’s children to graduate from Mason. A year later, Jessica Valenzuela graduated, and she was followed by siblings Jennifer Roque, Rosa Roque, and Ramon Roque in 2013.

The entire family is really appreciative of EIP and George Mason for all the opportunities and wonderful education they have provided us with. ­—Ingrid Roque-Oviedo

The Woodbridge, Virginia, family is closely knit. In fact, both Ingrid Roque-Oviedo and Rosa Roque say they often tagged along with their older siblings while they were attending EIP events at Mason. That familiarity with the university at a young age helped prompt them to later attend Mason as well. Both women credit EIP with pre­ paring them for college and for their lives ahead as a whole.

“The entire family is really appreciative of EIP and George Mason for all the opportunities and wonderful education they have provided us with,” Ingrid RoqueOviedo says.

—John Hollis

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M E E T T H E M A S O N N AT I O N

Rodger Smith

PHOTO BY BETHANY CAMP

Job: Faculty Advisor, WGMU

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hile still in high school, Rodger Smith already had his sights set on radio. “Some kids say they want to be a doctor or a lawyer or a businessman when they grow up,” he says. “I wanted to work in radio.”

Now a faculty advisor for WGMU radio and an instructor in the Department of Communication, Smith brings his years of passion for radio and communication to Mason students.

SUMMER CAMPS: Smith is also the director of the WGMU Summer Radio Camp, a program geared toward middle and high school students interested in working in radio. He started the immensely successful program in 1996 with encouragement from Don Boileau, the Department of Communication chair at the time. “Each summer I employ three students to teach basic radio on-air production skills,” he says. “The campers create onair shows, promos, and video projects in two one-week sessions.

Since the station is online, parents can watch their children produce on-air work through the WGMU radio website.”

MAKING (RADIO) WAVES: Smith was drawn to radio at a young age and pursued his passion in his high school’s broadcasting club, where he worked with his mentor, current WINC morning show host Barry Lee. Smith recalls Lee trained BEST PART OF THE JOB: Some of Smith’s favorite aspects him for on-air work early on Sunday mornings. “I would not of WGMU radio are the dedicated staff and faculty members. be here at Mason if it wasn’t for Lee’s time and patience,” “I work with a dedicated student staff interested in making Smith says. Smith continued to work in radio at each school he WGMU the best student-led organization on campus and have attended. After earning his master’s degree from Shenandoah been fortunate enough to see them excel professionally and University in 1992 and working as production director for as community leaders,” he says.

WUSQ, Smith saw an advertisement in the Washington Post for —Lindsay Bernhards, BA ’18 a teach­ing position at Mason. “I came to Mason for the challenge.

I had done just about everything I wanted to do in radio, but I had never taught it.”

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25Ways

Mason IS MILI TARY FR IENDLY

For almost a decade, George Mason University has been ranked as one of the most military-friendly universities in the country. It is just one of the ways we are working to be inclusive and accessible—and to recognize you or your family member for your service.

Fall 2018 M A S O N S P I R I T | 13

JENNIFER CONNORS

1

A DEDICATED OFFICE

Mason was one of the first universities to create an office dedicated to helping veterans and active-duty service mem­bers navigate the admissions process. In the last 10 years, the Office of Military Services has grown from a cubicle in the Office of Admissions to a full-service resource center in Student Union I. Led by Air Force vet­eran and current reservist Jennifer Connors, the office includes staff from almost every branch of the armed forces, and they’ve all used military-related education benefits.

2

ROTC

The George Mason Army ROTC Patriot Battalion began in 1982, achieved independent status in 2000, and frequently conducts training with colleges and universities through­out Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Since its inception, 362 soldiers from the ROTC Patriot Battalion have commissioned.

3

FREE LEGAL CLINIC

M-VETS, the Mason Veterans and Servicemembers Legal Clinic affiliated with Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School, provides free legal representation to active-duty service members, veterans, and their dependents while offering law students the opportunity to receive supervised, practical legal experience by advocating for those who serve or have served in our armed forces. M-VETS was the first clinic of its kind at any law school in the United States of America. Since its founding in 2004, the clinic has assisted hundreds of clients with negotiations and litigation in such areas as Veterans Affairs benefits, Dis­ charge Review Boards, Boards for Correction of Military Records, family law, landlord-tenant disputes, and contract matters.

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5

PROVIDING A CREATIVE OUTLET

Since 2014, the Veterans and the Arts Initiative has served as an arts and community hub for our local veterans, service members, their families, and com­ munity members. The year-round pro­gram, which is located at the Hylton Performing Arts Center, offers workshops, lessons, exhibitions, performances, and special events. Each year, the Hylton Center hosts Celebrating Veterans and the Arts, which includes an afternoon of music, art, and support from the local community. The program is just one of the initiative’s offerings that celebrate military service through the arts.

“It’s an opportunity to give back to our military,” says Niyati Dhokai, BA Music ’04, who directs the initiative.

“We serve a very diverse group of people—from preschool-age children of service members to World War II veterans. It’s something I’m really proud of.”

4

MAKING MEDICAL SCHOOL A REALITY

Each year, noncommissioned officers from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps have the opportunity to follow their dreams of becoming physicians with the help of Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences’ Enlisted to Medical Degree Preparatory Program (EMDP2) and Mason.

In this 24-month program, candidates attend school full time at Mason’s Science and Technology Campus to pre­ pare them to apply to medical school while remaining on active duty. The program includes full-time medical school preparatory course work in a traditional class­ room setting, structured pre-health advising, formal Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) preparation, dedicated faculty and peer mentoring, and integrated clinical exposure. Students who complete the program successfully will qualify to apply to most U.S. medical schools.

The fifth cohort started at Mason this fall. The EMDP2 students have a 95 percent acceptance rate to medical school within the first application cycle in which they apply.

6

BRINGING MASON STUDENTS TO THE VA’S WORKFORCE

In 2017, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) signed a memorandum of understanding with Mason to formalize their relationship as part of the Student Outreach and Recruitment initiative. Under this agreement, the VA will work closely with Mason’s College of Health and Human Services to recruit students for internships and career opportunities. The initiative aims to help eliminate potential barriers to diverse representation within the VA’s workforce.

“We chose to partner with Mason because they are the most diverse university in the commonwealth,” says Georgia Coffey, deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Diversity and Inclusion at the VA. “With the diversity that students bring to Mason, they bring diversity of thought, which is a tremendous asset for us.”

Fall 2018 M A S O N S P I R I T | 15

7

A PATHWAY TO A BSN Mason’s Nursing Veteran Co-Enrollment BSN Program provides students with the opportunity to complete a bachelor of science in nursing at Mason and an associate of applied science at a partner community college—typically Northern Virginia Community College—to become a registered nurse. This program was built to be a clear pathway to a degree for active-duty service members and veterans.

All of the Mason classes are online and can be taken concurrently with the community college classes.

8

TRANSFER CREDIT OPTIONS

Eighteen percent of the students in Mason’s Bachelor of Individualized Study (BIS) program are veterans. Designed for adult learners, the BIS offers students generous transfer credit options and the opportunity to integrate other college-level learning, such as professional or military experience, into university course work. Students create interdisciplinary concentrations to meet their own educational needs, which may include advancing professionally, preparing for graduate or professional programs, or planning a path toward a career change. The BIS is the only Mason degree program that can accept transfer credit for veterans’ military trainings from their Joint Services Transcripts as prescribed by the American Council on Education.

100

FAST-TRACK FORENSICS

9

FROM THE HALLS OF MONTEZUMA TO CAPITOL HILL This fall the inaugural cohort of 9 U.S. Marine Corps congressional fellows began taking classes at Mason’s Schar School of Policy and Government. The new program enables a select group of Marines to work toward a master of public policy, after which they spend a year applying their degree in their work as military legislative liaisons for members of Congress.

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Mason’s Forensic Science Program hosts an inten­sive one-year graduate program for active-duty U.S. Army and Air Force service members.

After a rigorous application pro­cess through their chosen agency, students work on an MS in forensic science. Upon completion, they are placed in forensic science officer positions through their branch of the military.

PAYING IT FORWARD

Veteran and Mason graduate student Henry Thomas, BSW ’17, was wounded in Afghanis­ tan in 2011. He was awarded a Purple Heart and subse­quently received a medical retirement.

He and his wife, Marjorie Thomas, MPA ’17, enrolled at Mason in 2015 looking to explore new career paths.

Henry enrolled in the social work program.

Marjorie started working on her master of public administration degree part time. After a few semesters, she made the difficult decision

12

to give up her job as an administrative pro­ fessional to better focus on the couple’s four young children and her studies.

With the help of an ERPi Patriot Scholarship for Veterans and Dependents of Veterans, as well as student loans, Marjorie was able to complete her degree in two years. She also parlayed a paid ERPi internship into a full-time position as a project manager at the Fairfaxbased company.

ERPi provides consulting services to federal clients in military and health sectors. Founder Chris Jones, MA ’99, established the scholar­ ship fund in 2012. A disabled veteran himself, Jones is dedicated to helping veterans and their families.

ERPi Patriot Scholarships are available to stu­ dents in the Schar School of Policy and Govern­ ment and the College of Health and Human Services. In spring 2018, more than 20 Mason students received ERPi support.

DEALING WITH THE IMPACTS OF WAR

Helping those who served in the armed forces learn to freely express their feelings is the goal of Coming Home: Dialogues on the Moral, Psychological, and Spiritual Impacts of War, a project directed by Jesse Kirkpatrick, the assistant director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, housed within Mason’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

“It’s the least I can do to give back to the 1 per­ cent who do serve,” says Kirkpatrick, who directs the project with Edward T. Barrett, the director of research at the U.S. Naval Academy’s (USNA) Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership.

Using sources from philosophy, history, poetry, and literature as discussion prompts, the National Endowment of the Humanitiessupported program brings combat veterans together for two days of conversation. The readings, which focus on conflicts from World War I to Afghanistan, have proven cathartic for veterans previously unable or unwilling to openly speak about their own combat experiences. A group of trained facilitators directs each exchange. “The point is to allow people to share their experiences however they do it best,” Kirkpatrick says.

PHOTO BY EVAN CANTWELL

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College Factual

MASON

#10 ranked

nationally as a top college for veterans.

13

A VETERANS SOCIETY

Mason’s Veteran Patriots is the university’s chapter of the Student Veterans of America (SVA), a national network of 1.1 million military-connected students and veteran supporters with servicefocused chapters on university campuses across the United States. The chapter works closely with Mason’s Office of Military Services to connect student veterans to industry recruiters, attend national conferences, and plan service projects to benefit the campus community and beyond.

“As citizens and students of a global university, we have a responsibility to everyone around us to start leading right now,” says communication major and veteran EJ Delpero, who worked for the U.S. Navy’s Riverine Force. “SVA represents a way to answer the call of responsibility at our university and for others to make the most out of their experience as students.”

The chapter recently won a Seeds of Change Award for Outstanding Partnerships for working alongside other organizations in support of Mount Vernon High School’s A Place To Stand, an initiative to eliminate hunger and homelessness in Northern Virginia.

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TRIBUTE TO A TRAILBLAZER

Former Mason faculty member General Hazel Johnson-Brown was also the first African American woman to become an Army general and chief of the Army Nurse Corps. She made military history in 1979 when she was promoted to brigadier general and, at the same time, given command of the 7,000 nurses in the Army Nurse Corps. Her uniform is on display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

After retiring from the Army, Johnson-Brown joined Mason as a nursing professor and founded the Center for Health Policy Research and Ethics. She also inspired and men­ tored hundreds of students and colleagues at Mason’s College of Health and Human Services. Johnson-Brown died in 2011. The General Hazel Johnson-Brown Scholarship Fund celebrates her service and supports nursing students with financial need.

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HIGH-FLYING FELLOWSHIPS

Mason’s Department of Communication offers a fellow­ ship program in conjunction with the United States Air Force (USAF). Students undergo the USAF’s competitive selection process, and then they must apply for the depart­ ment’s MA in communication program. If admitted, these students have 18 months to complete their degrees— their course work serves as their Air Force assignment.

The fellowship prepares students for a career in the USAF Public Affairs Office—when they graduate, students serve in the Pentagon.

16

D I D YO U K N O W… STANDING BY YOU

The Military Alliance Program offers specialized training to Mason faculty and staff that provides an understand­ing of how to best support mili­tary students at Mason. Once they complete the training, partici­pants are certi­fied as being Military-Friendly Staff, a designation that they can then display in their offices or on their syllabi to signal that they are available to offer specialized support to the Mason military community.

Mason’s Center for Counseling and Psychological Ser­vices (CAPS) also provides treatment for children of veterans, veteran couples, and indi­vidual veterans who are dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Staff at CAPS also collaborate with Virginia’s Department of Veteran Services to provide evalua­ tions for veterans working on benefits claims for PTSD and traumatic brain injuries related to military service, and they work with lawyers throughout the process. Additionally, CAPS is part of Serving Together, a centralized hub of resources for veterans that includes housing, food, and psychological services.

17

One out of every

10

Mason

students—more than 3,700 in total— is a veteran, current military service member, or the dependent of one.

PAWS FOR A CAUSE

In the spring, veteran Dylan Arthur, BS Management ’18, organized Paws for a Cause on the Fairfax Campus with the help of Mason’s Office of Disability Services and the Student Health Advisory Board. The event aimed to educate students, faculty, and staff on how best to interact with service, therapy, and emotional support animals.

­—Farrokh Alemi

A former Marines police officer, Arthur was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and four traumatic brain injuries after a car crash. When Arthur’s PTSD symptoms are triggered, his service dog, Bella, acts as an interrupter and puts a paw on Arthur, licks his face, or jumps on him. But Bella, a black Lab-shepherd-husky mix, is a cutie, and strangers often pet her without asking permission, despite the indica­ tion on her vest that she is a working dog, complete with a patch that says “do not pet.”

“And as soon as somebody does that,” Arthur says, “her focus is gone, and she can’t do her job, and that puts my health in jeopardy.” According to Disability Services, there are 10 to 20 registered emotional support animals on campus.

Farrokh Alemi is a pioneer

“We’re trying to educate the Mason community,” says Jason Northrup, associate in the online management Services. “We’re seeing more and more students come to campus ofdirector patients of andDisability has provided requesting testimony to have emotional support animals with them in the dorms. We want congressional on students, faculty, and the role of the internet in staff to have a better understanding of when service animals comedelivery. into the classroom, what guides that.” health Fall 2018 M A S O N S P I R I T | 19

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GOING GLOBAL

With more than 200 study-abroad opportunities taking place in 60 countries, Mason can take all of its students anywhere in the world they want to be. Students using funds from the Department of Veterans Affairs may be able to apply some of their benefits to studying abroad if their degree program requires them to travel. A new Thank You Veteran Study-Abroad Award has also been established, which will help cover costs traditionally not covered by the Department of Veteran Affairs.

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BUILDING BRIDGES WITH THE U.S. NAVY

Oscar Barton Jr., chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering in Mason’s Volgenau School of Engineering, received a grant from the U.S. Department of the Navy to establish the Mason-Navy Ambassadors Program. Ambassadors are under­graduate students who will promote participation in Navy programs to local middle and high school students through face-to-face forums and at Mason’s annual Engi­neering Youth Conference, held prior to the start of Engineers Week each February.

20

SALUTE! is the only

21

FIND YOUR TRIBE

Several student organizations at Mason have a military focus. The Military Law Society is dedicated to promoting knowledge and awareness of military law issues affecting students, law professionals, and members of America’s armed forces. The society is open to all students who wish to study the interface between the military, government, and the wider legal system. Mason also has its own chapter of the Society for American Military Engineers.

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national honor society that recognizes and honors the service and the scholastic achievements of student veterans. The Mason chapter is one of 230 chapters nationwide, and nearly 12,000 student veterans have been inducted since the society was started in 2009.

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SUPPORT THROUGH SCHOLARSHIPS

In addition to general scholarships, the univer­­ sity has funds set aside solely for members of the Mason military community. These include the Kevin and Veronica McCrohan Endowed Scholar­ ship, the Kara Anne Lang Endowed Scholarship, the Cornell Wells Endowed Scholarship, and the Veterans Endowed Scholarship. The requirements and award amounts vary among each fund, but all are reserved for Mason students who are active duty, reservists, or veterans.

Outside of scholarship opportunities, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute has generously funded a Veteran Emergency Fund to assist veterans with solutionfocused aid during times of need. The Office of Military Services runs the program.

P O I N T O F P R I D E Mason received a 2017 Military Friendly Schools Gold Award from militaryfriendly.com.

25

SOLVING REAL-WORLD PROBLEMS

More than 24 percent (or nearly $28 million) of Mason’s annual research expenditures are connected to Department of Defense (DoD) projects. DoD support runs the gamut from scholarships for graduate and doctoral students in cybersecurity, to research to develop a framework for integrating data on the structural performance of defense engineered systems (e.g., naval vessels), and research using novel ultrasonic sensing of muscle activity for control of prostheses.

24

ACTIVE DUTY AND ON CAMPUS

Mason hosts multiple funded scholar programs from both military and Department of Defense agencies. Each semester, active-duty officers attend Mason as part of the Army Advanced Civil Schooling Program and the Air Force Institute of Technology. Both programs assist officers in pursuing educational goals that meet the needs of the Army and Air Force.

TRAINING CYBER WARRIORS

Mason is one of six top-tier universities and 12 employers partnering with the Army Reserve in a first-of-its-kind effort to create educational pathways for future cyber warriors.

“The [Government Accountability Office] estimates that there is currently a need for 40,000 cybersecurity professionals just to satisfy the government’s demand,” says Lt. Gen. Jeffery Talley, chief of the U.S. Army Reserve. “Our belief is the [Army Reserve Cyber Private Public Partnership] effort will serve as a seed to enhance these critical efforts and lessen the skilled soldiers shortage gap.”

Mason is among the universities tailoring its curriculum to address the military’s needs. The goal is to train and educate Army Reserve soldiers to be elite cybersecurity professionals through classroom work and field experience.

Fall 2018 M A S O N S P I R I T | 21

PHOTO BY RON AIRA

With the help of a Fulbright grant, PhD student SARAH ROSE-JENSEN conducted a two-year ethnographic study of urban and rural communities in Cambodia.

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what’s up,

Docs?

Doctoral students are a vital part of a large research university. In this feature we look at several researchers who have made Mason their educational end zone.

B Y CO L L E E N K E A R N E Y R I C H , M FA ’ 95

D

octor of Philosophy (PhD), Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP), Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA), and so on. Regard­less of what the doctoral degree is called, all are terminal degrees, which means they are the highest degree awarded in that field.

Each year, George Mason University graduates roughly 270 doc­toral stu­ dents from 39 programs ranging from cultural studies to systems engi­ neer­ing. Some of the university’s largest doctoral degree programs include education, economics, nursing, psychology, and public policy.

Earning a doctoral degree is a process that can take up to nine years, in­volves conducting original research, and ends with a book—a dissertation that has to be orally defended in front of an audience and is published by the university.

Mason’s doctoral students are a bit unusual because about two-thirds of them are working professionals, according to Cody Edwards, associate provost for graduate education.

“A lot of our students have full-time jobs,” says Edwards, who is also execu­ tive director of the Smithsonian-Mason School of Conservation. “The majority of them are what we historically would have considered parttime. So you might already be in your career and you need this as the next thing. There are still many fields that require the technical expertise and experience that only doctoral students can glean.”

Many of Mason’s doctoral students are working in area school sys­tems, at health care organizations, or even at Washington, D.C., museums and nongovernmental agencies. The doctoral degree helps take them to the next level, professionally.

Fall 2018 M A S O N S P I R I T | 23

Mason awarded

314

doctoral

degrees in May 2018.

Mason environmental science and public policy PhD student Blake Klocke was getting ready to start his senior year at the Uni­ versity of Wisconsin–River Falls when he met conservation biologist Brian Gratwicke while volunteering at the Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project.

Gratwicke, who leads the amphibian conservation programs at the Smith­sonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI), was the one who encouraged the aspiring herpetologist Klocke to consider Mason for his graduate work.

“After returning from Panama, I was able to travel to Wash­ ington, D.C., and visit the Smithsonian National Zoo, SCBI, and Mason, which solidified my decision to attend,” says Klocke, who is working on a research project to rein­troduce an endangered frog to the wild in Panama.

In addition to his research at SCBI, Klocke is “teaching my way through, which is challenging and has its own rewards.”

Many of Mason’s doctoral students teach some of the 100and 200-level classes in their field at the university and

One of STEPHANIE SEAL WALTERS’s favorite things about Mason is its proximity to some of the most famous American historical sites.

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work on research—both with their dissertation director or mentor, as well as their own original research.

Mentoring doctoral students is a major investment for the university, but an important one, says Edwards. “When you look at the research that’s done day to day, week to week at the university, most of that work is done by graduate students.

You want to have a talented and dynamic group of student collaborators.

“The reason that most of us are in this business is because we really appreciate the interaction, and we want to be the best mentors that we can be,” he adds. “We want to make cer­tain that, when they leave, they are ready for that next step pro­ fessionally. After all, they are the workforce of the future.”

STEPHANIE SEAL WALTERS, HISTORY College of Humanities and Social Sciences PhD candidate Stephanie Walters took her childhood love for history with her all the way to her dissertation, where she started with a single question: Were there loyalists in Virginia at the time

of the Revolutionary War? Modern historians believe that only a few hundred loyalists, then called Tories, existed across the state.

However, after several years of archival research, Walters has identified around 3,000 loyalists who resided in Vir­ ginia during the Revolutionary War—and they were not just associated with isolated groups. “They were all a part of like-minded networks and communities that stretched from the Tidewater to the backcountry,” says Walters.

In working on her dissertation, she has built her own data­ sets and digital networks using archival analysis, news­papers, books, and the Loyalist Claims Commission to identify the role that loyalists played in the Virginia Revolutionary narrative.

After earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from the University of Southern Mississippi, Walters ini­ tially came to Mason via a fellowship at the Roy Rosen­zweig Center for History and New Media, where she worked with National History Day’s 100 Leaders Project and con­ducted user testing for histories of the National Mall.

PhD student BLAKE KLOCKE’s lifelong interest in amphibians led to his work attempting to save an endangered frog species in Panama.

the world caused by the disease chytridiomycosis, that set Klocke on his career path.

When she is not working on her dissertation, Walters is a “In this article, there were several photos of ‘amphibian arks,’ digital humanities specialist at the Digital Scholarship Cen­ which are captive assurance colonies where highly suscep­ ter in Fenwick Library and works on numerous digital tible species are kept and bred in captivity—safe from the history projects. chytrid fungus—to mitigate the threat,” he says. “I searched for opportunities on the internet and discovered that there Walters says her favorite thing about Mason is its location— was an ark in Panama. I knew that I had to go.” the university is close to some of the most famous American historical sites, a subject that is deeply personal to her. “His­ Klocke recently returned from his fourth trip to Panama, tory, at its core, is the study of humanity,” she says. “That’s where he works with the Panama Amphibian Rescue and why I love it.”

Conservation Project. This summer he introduced captive—Lindsay Bernhards, BA ’18

BLAKE KLOCKE, ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY Mason PhD student Blake Klocke has been interested in amphibians for as long as he can remember. He talks about growing up in Minnesota, where he shared his bedroom with a few dozen frogs, snakes, and geckos, as well as the insects he cultivated to feed them.

It was a National Geographic article titled “The Vanishing,” which detailed the decline in amphibian populations around

Watch Blake Klocke at work in Panama at bit.ly/PhDfrogs

bred limosa harlequin frogs to the wild.

“This was my second field season working with this species,” says Klocke, who is pursuing his degree while working as a graduate student researcher at the Smithsonian Conser­va­ tion Biology Institute’s (SCBI) Center for Conservation Genomics. “We equipped several [frogs] with tiny radio trans­­ mitters that weigh 0.31 grams. It’s truly fascinating.”

The radio transmitters allow researchers to find the frogs, which are swabbed once a week to identify whether the animal has become infected with the chytrid fungus.

Fall 2018 M A S O N S P I R I T | 25

“The most unforgettable moments are the first time you see a species in the wild. We call these moments ‘lifers,’” Klocke says. “Every day is a new adventure, and we always see the unexpected.”

—Colleen Kearney Rich, MFA ’95

SASKIA POPESCU, BIODEFENSE When she was 9 years old, Saskia Popescu read Richard Preston’s 1995 nonfiction thriller The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story on a family vacation. Much of it went over her head, but young Saskia was fascinated by the story of viral hemorrhagic fevers, Level 4 biocontainment areas, and Ebola virus-infected monkeys in suburban Northern Virginia.

She was so taken with the idea of controlling diseases, for Halloween that year she dressed as a pathologist, complete with hazmat suit.

Mason biodefense PhD student SASKIA POPESCU stands before the historic Eight Ball at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

The sphere was used to test aerobiological agents during the Cold War.

These days the hazmat suit isn’t a costume but a part of her occupation: Popescu is a real-life epidemiologist, working to control infections in Phoenix, Arizona, pediatric hospi­tals.

For now, the career is on hold as Popescu researches her bio­ defense PhD dissertation in Mason’s Schar School of Policy and Government, where she’s also a graduate research assis­ tant. Last year she was named a fellow in the prestigious Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity Initiative by the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University.

It was her strong interest in both the medical side of the field and the policy side that drew her to Mason’s Biodefense Program. “The program brings it all together to understand the complexities of health security,” she says. “We have experts from both fields coming to the classroom who can speak to all aspects, which is huge.”

Once her studies are completed, Popescu says she would like to find an academic position in a working medical insti­ tute. “That way I could teach, which I love, and still stay involved in infection control at the medical center, which is the only way to understand the complexities of the field.”

And as for Preston’s life-changing book, she says, “When you look back on it, you can see it’s the most scientifically inaccurate drama ever created. But at the time it was in­spir­ i­ng for a young mind.”

—Buzz McClain, BA ’77

DONAL MURRAY, REHABILITATION SCIENCE College of Health and Human Services PhD student Donal Murray turned his passion for sports into a career in rehabilitation science. “I really love sports, and I was never good enough at [playing] them to make a career out of it,” he says, “so I turned to the science behind them.”

Born and raised in Cork City, Ireland, Murray completed his bachelor of science in sport and exercise science from the University of Limerick and volunteered as a strength and conditioning coach with several Irish sports teams. He com­ pleted a master of science in exercise physiology at Central Michigan University before coming to Mason.

Murray is researching muscular performance in people with incomplete spinal cord injuries. He studies how their muscles respond to a 12-week locomotor training by measur­ing the

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Rehabilitation science PhD student DONAL MURRAY is working to improve outcomes for those with incomplete spinal cord injuries.

change in oxygen in their blood and the level of activation of the muscles.

Murray is working with seven participants for this study, which is a typical sample size for this type of injury. “It’s amazing to see the progression they’ve made. Some of them have done two or three cycles, and they continue to im­prove. They have moved from using a wheelchair as their primary means of movement to using a cane or crutches.

You can see it makes a difference in their lives.”

Murray came to Mason because he was interested in a more clinical program. “I was surprised by how big Mason is and how much great research is being done here. In our college alone, the wide variety of studies is fantastic. Even in our own department there is the opportunity to get involved in research on a range of topics from spinal cord injury to Parkinson’s to lupus.”

—Danielle Hawkins

SARAH ROSE-JENSEN, CONFLICT ANALYSIS AND RESOLUTION “When the government is not performing its role and ful­fill­ As a former anti-war organizer and nonviolence trainer ing its responsibilities, the communities I am looking at are during the Iraq War, Sarah Rose-Jensen’s decision to enroll organizing to demand changes,” says Rose-Jensen. in Mason’s School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution to study social mobilization against forced evictions in Cam­ As part of her work in Cambodia, Rose-Jensen observed bodia was personal. the communities and conducted in-depth interviews with the members. She has published several academic papers In her previous work with the Iraq War, Rose-Jensen learned on the subject and presented at conferences in Hong Kong about the same anti-war tactics and methodologies that her and Singapore. mother was taught when she was an anti-Vietnam War protestor. Realizing that the field had undergone few changes Rose-Jensen recalls her time in Cambodia as some of the since the 1970s, Rose-Jensen decided to return to Mason most impactful of her academic career. “Conducting research for her PhD. in Cambodia was an intense experience,” she says. “Per­son­ ally, I still feel very close to the country and the friends “I came back to graduate school in large part to study social I made there.” mobilization and how to innovate these tactics,” she says.

Approximately

66%

of Mason’s doctoral students are working professionals.

—Lindsay Bernhards, BA ’18

Under the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, one of the most prestigious grants offered in the United States, Rose-Jensen conducted a two-year ethnographic study of urban and rural communities in Cambodia. She found that by participating in social mobilization, community members in Cambodia developed a stronger identity of who they were as citizens and the role of government in an organized society.

POUYA GHOLIZADEH, CIVIL ENGINEERING When Mason Engineering doctoral student Pouya Gholiz­ adeh was walking near his apartment complex in Fairfax recently, he was alarmed to see a construction employee on the roof of a building working without a hard hat or any safety system that would protect him if he fell.

Fall 2018 M A S O N S P I R I T | 27

Civil engineering PhD student POUYA GHOLIZADEH’s research focuses on the safety of construction workers.

Gholizadeh knew this was an accident waiting to happen, and he has the research to back it up.

As a PhD student in civil engineering, he is reviewing fed­ eral government data to determine the causes of accidents and fatalities on construction sites. “The safety of construc­ tion workers is unfortunately not the best,” he says.

Gholizadeh decided to come as well. “I’m happy with this decision,” he says. “I like the vibrant environment of Mason and the interdisciplinary programs at the Volgenau School of Engineering.”

After he graduates in May 2019, Gholizadeh would like to continue to do research and teach at the college level.

His interest in this field dates back to his childhood grow­ ing up in Iran when he went with his father to his uncle’s construction sites, including homes and small apartment complexes. “As a kid, it fascinated me how a few men can work together and build something brick by brick.”

He hopes his work saves lives. “At the end of the day, we want to provide good information to safety managers on con­struc­ tion sites, so they can make better decisions and mitigate accident outcomes.”

Gholizadeh earned a BS in architectural engineering and an MS in project and construction management in Iran. He went on to get an MS in construction management with a minor in statistics from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL).

For more stories about Mason doctoral students, visit spirit.gmu.edu.

He was working on his PhD with Behzad Esmaeli at UNL when Esmaeli decided to take a job as an assistant professor with Mason’s Sid and Reva Dewberry Department of Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure Engineering.

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—Nanci Hellmich

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ancient text yields new understanding 30 | FA S T E R FA R T H E R : T H E C A M PA I G N F O R G E O R G E M A S O N U N I V E R S I T Y

PHOTO BY EVAN CANTWELL

A Mason religious studies professor is leading a team of scholars who are translating a rare 16th-century Maya text.

B Y A N N E R E Y N O L D S >>>

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In 2018 the Theologia Indorum research team— Frauke Sachse, Garry Sparks, Saqijix Candelaria López Ixcoy, and Sergio Romero—met at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

F

or much of his career, George Mason University religious studies professor Garry Sparks has been piecing together the scattered remnants of a 16th-century text—the Theologia Indorum.

His team’s translation of that text from the Mayan language of K’iche’ to English and Spanish will shed light on how the first Spanish missionaries shared their faith in the New World in the 1500s.

The Theologia Indorum is identified as the first original Chris­ tian theology written in the Americas, and it had never been translated into any non-Mayan language. Originally written in two volumes, the work in its entirety is also the longest single text written in a Native American language—close to 900 pages.

Sachse, a linguistic anthropologist at the University of Bonn in Germany; Sergio Romero, a Guatemalan sociolinguist at the University of Texas at Austin; and Saqijix Candelaria López Ixcoy, a linguist at Rafael Landívar Uni­ ver­sity in Guatemala City and a native K’iche’ speaker. All have done extensive fieldwork in Guatemala, as well as archival research on colonial-era Maya documents.

Sparks, who specializes in the history of religions and Christian theology, is the principal investigator for the project. “A lot of the initial research was just tracking down how many In 2016, he and his research team received a National surviving copies we have, and none of them are complete, Endowment of the Humanities grant to prepare a critical so I’ve had to cobble them together,” says Sparks, who notes edition with English and Spanish translations of the first he did much of this work while working on his dissertation volume of the Theologia Indorum. at the University of Chicago.

Sparks is one of four scholars on the project—all fluent in K’iche’ and Spanish, and representing a variety of academic fields and universities. Other team members include Frauke 32 | FA S T E R FA R T H E R : T H E C A M PA I G N F O R G E O R G E M A S O N U N I V E R S I T Y

There are surviving copies in Paris at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, a few at Princeton University, a couple at Harvard University, and one each at the Newberry

Library in Chicago and at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. Sparks’s research included determin­ ing how extensive each surviving manuscript was, which language it was in, when it was written, and where it came from.

a collection of sermons or catechisms, with the few sur­ viving copies dispersed in repositories all over the world.

With help from Mason’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for His­ tory and New Media, the team will develop a website that will make the Theologia Indorum digitally available. Work­ ing with the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, the team will include full-color, high-resolution scanned images of its K’iche’ manuscript of Volume I, along with the scholarly transcription and translation, on the new website.

The project’s initial goal was to transcribe the first volume of the Theologia Indorum. Working remotely, with an annual, weeklong, face-to-face meeting every March, the team has actually been able to make a complete transcription of both Volumes I and II, and the transcription work has gone much “For the first time since the 16th more quickly than they had predicted would be possible. century, someone will be able Their next step is to produce an English and Spanish to read Volumes I and II and translation, both in terms of a literal translation of the get the entire architecture of document, “and then a much more fluid, idiomatic English the argument,” says Sparks. translation that will be much more accessible,” explains “The whole idea is to really Sparks. Though the emphasis will be on the English trans­ just get it out there so a lation, the team hopes to make the document accessible to whole host of other Spanish-speaking researchers as well. scholars across the disciplines can begin The Theologia Indorum goes beyond a simple imported and playing with it.” translated catechism. Written in the 1550s by Dominican friar Domingo de Vico, the text was initially composed in K’iche’, an indigenous language still spoken by more than one million Guatemalans today. The distinction is that “un­ like most Christian texts written in Native American langu­ ages, the Theologia Indorum was not a translation of a Western European Christian document,” says Sparks, who teaches in Mason’s Religious Studies Department. “Instead, [the text] was originally composed in a native language and then translated only into other related Mayan languages.”

Photo courtesy of the American Philosophical Society.

Equally important is that Vico’s text “incorporated aspects and elements of Maya religious beliefs and practices in his effort to translate concepts of Christianity to the Maya,” Sparks says. The name of the document, in fact, translates “to mean either the ‘Theology of the Indians’ or ‘Theology for the Indians.’ I’ve argued that both are correct, as Domin­go de Vico seems to have written his Christian theology specifically for the Highland Maya.”

Vico wrote the Theologia Indorum in two separate volumes, with Volume I completed in 1553 and Volume II completed in 1554. Until the 1970s, understanding of the text was limited, and its manuscript copies were often cataloged as Fall 2018 M A S O N S P I R I T | 33

taking a moment

Peterson Family Health Sciences Hall has quickly become one of the most popular spots on campus with its views of the Marcia and Anthony Di Trapani Rain Garden.

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INQUIRING MINDS

D I D YO U K N O W…

School of Theater professor

Edward Gero reprised his role of Antonin Scalia in The Originalist off Broadway at New York’s 59e59 Theaters.

Literary Detective Work

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ason statistics professor David I. Holmes used special statistical methods to uncover a second writer who contributed to an important book in American history. Holmes applied stylometry, the statistical analysis of literary style, to analyze Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. Experts have suggested that a 6,000-word passage in the book wasn’t written

by Paine but was instead penned by his friend the Marquis de Lafayette.

Holmes and Richard Forsyth, a researcher in Great Britain, compared the two famous men’s “word prints,” which is the way people subconsciously use words such as the, and, but, to, and from.

“It’s quite surprising the way people use the little words, the humble servants of speech,” Holmes says. “By looking at a large number of these words and their rate of occurrence, we can actually use statistics to detect who the author is with a high degree of accuracy.”

The researchers used three statistical techniques to analyze the book, and each showed that the passage in question was written by Lafayette. Their paper, “The Writeprints of Man: A Stylometric Study of Lafayette’s Hand in Paine’s ‘Rights of Man,’” will be published this year in Digital Humanities Quarterly.

Department of Statistics chair William Rosenberger says this “fascinating research shows that statistics is useful and important in history and literature, like it is in other disciplines.”

—Nanci Hellmich

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Changing How We Think About Work

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he on-demand economy is growing rapidly thanks to companies like Uber and Lyft. While it’s com­ monly thought that people join the on-demand workforce for supplemental income, new research suggests otherwise.

Mason management professor Kevin Rockmann and University of Virginia professor Gary Ballinger studied loyalty among professional on-demand workers. Their research, featured in the Journal of Applied Psychology, is one of the first published studies of on-demand work.

The results of their research were surprising. “It turns out a lot of people do this work not because of the money, but because they enjoy the work, specifically the increased autonomy and the social connection,” Rockmann says.

The research provides implications for how firms select workers. They usually choose based on avail­ ability, skills, qualifications, and whether workers are legally able to do the work. Instead, firms should select on-demand workers based on what they’re looking for in a job and what they’re missing in their current job— factors that will help workers build loyalty to the firm.

The research might also help break the stigma that on-demand work is just for those who need money.

“If [workers] can be happier and have a more fulfilling professional life by broadening the kinds of tasks they’re doing, then they’re going to be better off and so will the organization,” Rockman says.

While Rockmann notes that the employee-organization relationship “is much more similar to what we see in traditional firms than we typically think it is,” the ondemand economy is reshaping the workforce in other ways, particularly the ways people define employment.

“Maybe in 20 years, it won’t be working for one firm, but having a portfolio of firms that workers can choose from to use their skills and manage their own careers.”

—Katherine Johnson Dias

RESEARCH

What Kids Understand About Santa Claus

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o children really think that guy dressed up in a red suit and white beard at the mall is Santa Claus?

There is no harm if they do, says Mason psychologist Thalia Goldstein. In fact, a child’s eventual discovery that Santa Claus is a myth will aid in the development and reinforcement of their social abilities.

“Kids might be disappointed to find out he doesn’t exist. I’m still a little disappointed that he doesn’t exist,” says Goldstein, director of Mason’s Social Skills, Imagination, and Theater Lab. “But they get over it quickly.”

Goldstein bases that belief on two studies she conducted with psychologist Jacqueline Wooley, of the University of Texas-Austin, at a Connecticut museum with a dynamic Christmas display.

What they found was that 40 percent of kids, ages 3 to 10, believed the mall Santa was the real Santa. Another 40 percent believed that

while he wasn’t the real Santa, the man dressed as him still possessed some magical qualities. Another 15 percent thought the mall Santa communicated with the real Santa, while 5 percent thought the mall Santa was just some guy in a costume.

Interestingly, the more Santas children saw, the more likely they were to believe the one in front of them was real, Goldstein says. “This is his omnipresence. Our theory is that when you see Santa in all these different places, it is evi­dence he can be everywhere, that he knows when you are sleeping and knows when you are awake.”

Parental guidance can ease a child’s realiza­tion that Santa Claus is not real, she says. “Follow your child’s lead. If they want to be sad about [Santa not being real], that’s fine. But most kids are going to be pretty proud of them­selves [for figuring it out].”

—Damian Cristodero

Studying Rivers in the Air

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Cristiana Stan

ason atmospheric scientist Cristiana Stan is studying rivers found in the air in hopes of advancing scientists’ ability to predict the Earth’s climate.

She and Mason postdoctoral fellow Erik Swenson are working with Ruby Leung and other researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Together, the scientists are conducting a virtual field campaign to understand the mechanisms that drive the teleconnections—or links—between the tropics and midlatitudes.

The tropics represent the geographic region around the equator, from the Tropic of Cancer to the Tropic of Capricorn, while the midlatitudes are areas lying between 35 and 55 degrees north or south of the equator.

For her portion of the project, Stan is designing, con­ducting, and analyzing experiments using the Super‐ Parameterized Community Atmospheric Model. Superparameterization is a type of multimodel framework—

a technique for modeling a physical system with a wide range of important scales. The Community Atmospheric Model is the latest in a series of global atmosphere models developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research for the weather and climate research communities.

The researchers are working to determine whether processes in the tropics and midlatitudes favor, suppress, or influence the development of atmospheric rivers— narrow regions in the atmosphere that are responsible for most of the horizontal movement of water vapor outside of the tropics—and their moisture budgets.

A moisture budget is the balance of water flowing into and out of a defined area over a specific time period.

In September, Stan presented her findings at the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s International Conferences on Subseasonal to Decadal Prediction in Boulder, Colorado.

—Elizabeth Grisham, BA ’02, MA ’12 Fall 2018 M A S O N S P I R I T | 37

INQUIRING MINDS

Predicting the Wandering of Individuals with Dementia ACCORDING TO THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION, the number of people affected by Alzheimer’s and dementia will triple over the next 30 years, and up to 60 percent of them will wander and become lost at least once.

A new study by researchers in Mason’s College of Health and Human Services analyzed data from GPS trackers to predict if individuals with dementia are wandering. They used machine learning methods to identify routine movement patterns and other patterns that may indicate wandering.

“When individuals with Alzheimer’s or dementia wander, it can be dangerous and cause their loved ones great concern,” says Janusz Wojtusiak, director of health informatics at the college.

Individuals’ data were collected from the GPS SmartSole, a tracking device devel­ oped by GTX Corp that includes GPS and Global System for Mobile communica­ tions (GSM) units embedded in shoe soles to provide real-time geolocation data for wearers. A sample of 338 GPS trackers with at least 14 days of data was used to study wandering habits in elderly people.

Wojtusiak’s research predicted locations and routes of movement with high accuracy, which allows the opportunity to detect unusual movements that may correspond to wandering.

“Until now, there hasn’t been the ability to predict the movements of these individuals as they are wandering,” he says. “We’re proud to take the lead on potentially finding a long-sought solution to this puzzle.”

—Jiaxi Zhang

I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing

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or Mason multicultural education professor Shelley Wong, music is an important tool in the teaching of languages.

Music—or songs, to be more precise—is central to the proposal Wong used to win a Fulbright Fellowship this year, which allowed her to travel to the West Bank in Palestine, where she is teaching grammar to students majoring in English and instructors at Birzeit University, near Ramallah, while also engaging them in discussions about justice, peace, and reconciliation.

Music affords students of all ages and language abilities a way to explore global awareness and cross barriers of race, gender, and class, Wong says.

What makes her project unique is “the power of popular music to unite people around the world who have previously been divided and isolated from each other.” She also cites numerous studies that indicate music helps the teaching of vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar through lessons accompanying the lyrics.

An international research team helped compile Wong’s songbook, which is designed to address major grammatical challenges and to ensure a connection to peace and justice issues.

For example, Beyoncé’s “If I Were a Boy” will allow for a discussion about unreal conditionals, which Wong calls “a troublesome grammar point.” It can also prompt discussions about gender stereotypes and violence against women, she says.

The Beatles’ “Blackbird” can be used to teach the past progressive tense, and the lyrics can help students imagine different futures.

“I’m interested in ways we can look at things, deal with things: peace, justice on a classroom level, on a playground level,” she says. “How do we deal with acceptance of people who have different opinions, religions, no religion? Through songs and language, you can deal with a lot.”

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—Damian Cristodero

Fulbright Fellow Shelley Wong

RESEARCH

Sometimes Research Is a Drag

S

tudents from Mason epidemiology professor Michael von Fricken’s GCH 426 Global Emerging Infectious Diseases class spent two weeks in Kenya this past summer learning about the transmission of diseases like yellow fever and collecting ticks and mosquitoes.

The students helped von Fricken and Lindsey Shields, a veterinarian with the Smithsonian’s Global Health Pro­gram, carry out ongoing vector-borne disease research. With the help of the student researchers, the team col­lected more than 1,500 ticks in a week—a task that von Fricken says would have taken him three months to do by himself.

It was the perfect blend of an immersive experience for infectious disease research as well as a crash course in wildlife conservation.

—Michael von Fricken

Working at the wildlife conservancy Mpala Research Centre, students collected ticks by dragging home­made tick drags—large pieces of cloth that the ticks latch onto—and checking them periodically.

Samples were transferred to the Smithsonian’s Walter Reed Biosystematics Unit, where the ticks and mosquitoes will be screened for a variety of infectious agents.

“There is a lot of research value in these samples,” says von Fricken. The trip received funding from Mason’s Global Educa­tion Office through their Global Discovery Program, which supports global experiences that are travel components of existing for-credit courses. The program cut the cost of the trip in half for students.

“It was the perfect blend of an immersive experience for infectious disease research, as well as a crash course in wildlife conservation,” says von Fricken.

“I didn’t expect to actually go out in a field to catch and pick up ticks for research,” says Allie Vega, BS Community Health ’18. “But it puts into perspective what fieldwork is like for these infectious diseases and how nitty-gritty you have to get.”

—Mary Lee Clark

While working in Kenya, Mason students collected ticks for analysis with homemade tick drags made of large pieces of cloth.

Risk Assessment in Foreign Arms Sales

B

etween 2002 and 2016, the United States sold $197 billion worth of arms and training through the Foreign Military Sales program to foreign countries. In fact, the United States rarely turned down a request despite possible national secur­ ity threats.

A new risk index created by Schar School of Policy and Government’s A. Trevor Thrall and policy analyst Caroline Dorminey of the Cato Institute’s Defense and Foreign Policy Department, reveals that 32 of the 167 nations receiving weapons and training from U.S. sources had higher risk index scores than the 16 countries banned from buying any weapons by the United Nations.

Thrall, who is also a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, was surprised by those numbers.

He says he was inspired to create the index because he could find no evidence of the risk assessments the government is required by law to conduct before approving arms sales.

“The failure to conduct adequate risk assessments means that weapons will wind up being used in ways that intensify civil and interstate conflict, amplify insurgencies, or promote corruption and instability,” he says.

Thrall and Dorminey spent about a year creating the index using a variety of different available metrics. The index will be revised and updated this fall by Thrall and Schar School PhD student Jordan Cohen.

—Buzz McClain, BA ’77 Fall 2018 M A S O N S P I R I T | 39

SHELF LIFE

Recently published works by Mason faculty

In her book (Cornell Uni­ versity Press, November 2017), Pichichero examines a crisis in consciousness that has characterized attitudes toward war from the 18th century until today. The demands of

God at the Grassroots, 2016: The Christian Right in American Politics Mark J. Rozell, dean, Schar School of Policy and Government, with Clyde Wilcox (eds.)

In this book (Rowman & Littlefield, November 2017) a distinguished group of political scientists, many of whom have been study­ ing the Christian Right for more than two decades, assess the 2016 elections from the standpoint of religious conservative activism. These elections, more than any that these political scientists have analyzed, best tell the story of the resilience of this movement and its endur­ ing importance.

The Military Enlighten­ ment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon Christy Pichichero, assis­ tant professor, Modern and Classical Languages

global political power warrant an ever more formid­able and efficient fiscal-military state; at the same time, awareness of the “human factor” gen­er­ ates the desire to minimize the devastation of war on cities, landscapes, and civilians, as well as the mind, body, and heart of the soldier.

Rural Sustainability: A Complex Systems Approach to Policy Analysis Qing Tian, assistant pro­ fessor, Computational Social Science Tian’s book (Springer International Publishing, May 2017) analyzes the human-environment impact of urbanization on the Poyang Lake region

of China and assesses how government policy can reduce environmental impact amid the popu­la­ tion change. The case study addresses how rural populations in developing countries are subject to the influence of globali­za­ tion and the target of cli­ mate change in the dynamic process of urbanization.

Creating Distinctions in Dutch Genre Painting: Repetition and Invention Angela Ho, associate professor, History and Art History In the mid- to late 17th century, a number of Dutch painters created a new type of refined genre painting that was much admired by elite collectors.

In this book (Amsterdam

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University Press, June 2017), Angela Ho uses the examples of Gerrit Dou, Gerard ter Borch, and Frans van Mieris to show how this group of artists made creative use of repe­ tition to project a dis­tinc­ tive artistic personality.

Tolerance in World History (Themes in World History) Peter N. Stearns, Univer­ sity Professor, History and Art History This volume (Routledge, June 2017) draws together the many discrete studies of tolerance to create a global and comprehensive synthesis. A historical back­drop helps to clarify the contours of these ten­ sions and promote greater understanding of the advantages and challenges of a tolerant approach.

The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money Bryan Caplan, professor, Economics In this book (Princeton University Press, January 2018), Caplan argues that the primary function of education is not to enhance students’ skills but to cer­ tify their intelligence, work ethic, and conformity—in other words, to signal the qualities of a good employee.

LA Sports: Play, Games, and Community in the City of Angels David W. Wiggins, pro­ fessor, Recreation, Health, and Tourism, with Wayne Wilson (Eds.) LA Sports (University of Arkansas Press, February

Unraveling a Tragedy 2018) brings together 16 essays covering various aspects of the develop­ment and changing nature of sports in one of America’s most famous cities. Topics range from the power of the Mexican fan base in American soccer leagues to the origins of Muscle Beach and surfing.

environment influenced the development of Latin American artistic identity.

Introduction to Housing

Transatlantic Encounters: Latin American Artists in Paris between the Wars Michele Greet, associate professor, History and Art History Latin American artists contributed to and reinter­ preted nearly every major modernist movement that took place in the creative center of Paris between World War I and World War II, including Cubism, Sur­ realism, and Constructivism.

This book (Yale University Press, March 2018) illumi­ nates the significant ways in which Latin American expatriates helped estab­ lish modernism and, con­ versely, how a Parisian

Katrin B. Anacker, asso­ ciate professor, Schar School of Policy and Government, with Andrew T. Carswell, Sarah Kirby, and Kenneth R. Tremblay (Eds.) This foundational text (University of Georgia Press, July 2018) for under­ standing housing design, homeownership, housing policy, and housing in a global context has been revised to reflect the changed housing situation in the United States dur­ ing and after the Great Recession and its subse­ quent movements toward recovery.

I

n her latest book, The Tragedy of Benedict Arnold: An American Life (Pegasus Books, 2018), Antonin Scalia Law School professor Joyce Lee Malcolm takes a new look at the man commonly known as one of the most infamous traitors in U.S. history.

What inspired you to write this book?

I learned about Benedict Arnold’s amazing military exploits when researching my previous book, Peter’s War. Arnold has been regarded as the best officer on either side in the Revolution­ ary War. In addition to risking his life on numer­ ous battlefields, he paid his men from his personal funds when Congress failed to pay them, and he remained faithful to the cause after receiving a grievous wound and being denied credit for his great victory at Saratoga. Yet he has typically been seen as a two-dimensional character: Self-serving, greedy, and too zealous for advance­ ment; his name a synonym for traitor. That verdict didn’t seem to make sense, and I wanted to understand the man and his time more fully and find out why he decided to switch to the British side.

Did anything in your research surprise you?

Many things surprised me. I was unaware of the bitter dissension within the patriot side, and how Congress constantly micro-managed the Continental Army, fearful a popular general would seize power. Officers were charged and court-martialed for surrendering a fort or being ambushed; foreign officers imposed on Washington at high rank. Arnold’s wife, Peggy Shippen, is now regarded as enticing him into committing treason. Seven books have been written about her recently, all painting her as a villain. But when I looked at the evidence I found she was innocent. My book exonerates Peggy.

You use the word “tragedy” in the title. What made you decide on that word?

I used the word “tragedy” in the title because it fits Arnold’s life perfectly . . . . Had he died when he was shot leading the winning charge at Saratoga, he would have been regarded as one of our greatest heroes. Had the British won, he would have been seen as saving lives by shortening the war. Instead he lived, a cripple attacked by a slew of enemies, finally making the grievous decision that lost him all honor and respect forever.

—Colleen Kearney Rich, MFA ’95

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ALUMNI IN PRINT

Recently published works by Mason alumni

Blood and Needles Billy Lyons, MA Psychology ’99 Intrigue Publishing, June 2017 Lyons’s debut novel, Blood and Needles, is a paranormal romance that tells the story of Steven Jameson and the Morphia Clan, a group of vampires who enjoy nar­ cot­ics as much as they do blood.

Lyons’s work has been published in the High Strange Horror anthology and the Another Realm e-zine. He lives in Doran, Virginia.

The Political Theology of European Integra­ tion: Comparing the Influence of Religious Histories on European Policies Mark R. Royce, PhD Political Science ’16 Palgrave-MacMillan Press, June 2017 This book traces the con­nec­ tions between diverg­ing postwar European inte­gra­ tion policies and intraChristian divisions to argue that supranational integra­ tion originates from Roman Catholic interna­tionalism, and that resis­tance to integration, con­versely, is based in Protestantism.

Royce is an assistant pro­ fessor of political science at Northern Virginia Com­

munity College, where he teaches international rela­ tions courses.

The F Text Douglas Luman, MFA Creative Writing ‘07 Inside the Castle, October 2017 Luman’s debut book is a fabrication constellating the uncertain voices of Marco Polo’s history and perceptions through a sprawling and skeletal layering of erased bodies.

Luman is a fiction re­ viewer for the Found Poetry Review, head researcher at appliedpoetics.org, art director at Stillhouse Press, and poetry editor of Phoebe.

Catharsis: Why I Left the FBI Machelle Johnson, BA Psychology ’04, MA Political Science ’07 Machelle Johnson, July 2017 This exposé carries the reader through the plight of one woman’s almost 12year career with the FBI, documenting everything from mismanagement, nepotism, and an utter lack of human resources, to gross fiscal liberties taken by rogue executive manage­ ment, and possible racial bias.

Johnson is a profess­ional writer whose prior written

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work has been published with a progressive think tank and used to stimulate collegiate-level classroom dialogue.

Strange Children Dan Brady, MA Arts Management ’05 Publishing Genius Press, April 2018 What happens when a lifethreatening event upends a young couple’s plan for their family? Strange Children is an emotional reckoning of medical trauma, mar­ri­age, family, loss, and adoption.

Dan Brady is the author of two chapbooks, Cabin Fever/Fossil Record and Leroy Sequences. He is the poetry editor of Barrelhouse and lives in Arlington, Virginia, with his wife and two children.

Raising Boys into Extraordinary Young Men Monica Hawkins, PhD Environmental Science and Public Policy ‘09 AuthorHouse, April 2018 For years, numerous par­ ents, teachers, and coaches asked what Hawkins was specifically doing to raise her son. The book is her blueprint that she used to raise her son to be an articu­ late, self-confident, intelli­ gent, and extraordinary young man and leader.

Hawkins wants to inspire other parents to raise their sons with similar attributes to her son.

Hawkins is a wife, mother, sports fan, and a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. She has been a mentor, tutor, coach, and motivational speaker to numerous youngsters.

Dinner in Camelot Joseph A. Esposito, MA History ’98 Fore Edge, April 2018 In April 1962, President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy hosted 49 Nobel Prize winners— along with many other prominent scientists, artists, and writers—at a famed White House dinner.

Held at the height of the Cold War, the dinner sym­ bolizes a time when intel­ lectuals were esteemed, divergent viewpoints could be respectfully dis­ cussed at the highest level, and the great minds of an age might all dine together in “the people’s house.”

Esposito has served in three presidential adminis­ trations, most recently as a deputy under secretary at the U.S. Department of Education. He lives in Virginia with his wife and two sons.

PAT R I O T P R O F I L E

Noah Shoates YEAR: Senior

MAJOR: Information Systems and Operations Management PHOTO BY EVAN CANTWELL

HOMETOWN: Sterling, Virginia

S

enior Noah Shoates is one of the student directors of Patriot Pantry, formerly known as the Pop-Up Pantry, which is a branch of the university’s Student Support and Advocacy Center that collects staple food and hygiene items for food- and/or housing-insecure Mason students. With help from donors and student volunteers, Shoates and his fellow student director, Gary Hooker, served more than 70 students last semester.

Getting on Board: The pantry was started in December 2014 by a graduate assistant and a full-time University Life staffer who identified the need for a pantry based on student survey results. Shoates first heard of the project when one of the founders came to his Leadership and Community Engagement Living Learning Community class to reach out to potential volunteers. Shoates had previous experience with a food pantry initiative from another community service project.

He saw that the volunteers not only helped people get access to highquality food, but they also served as a support system. “It’s more than just a pantry,” he says. “It’s a community.”

Finding Inspiration: As a student director, Shoates spends more than 10 hours a week researching food and home insecurity, organizing food drives, speaking in classes, and setting up outreach initiatives. His favorite moments, however, are when he shares in the students’ successes. “The students have such powerful stories. They are very

strong and are not only earning amazing GPAs, but they are also going through way more than most people should ever have to experience in their entire life. It’s truly inspiring.”

Feels like Family: According to Shoates, working with the Patriot Pantry has been one of the most difficult—and the most rewarding— experiences of his academic career. The volunteers, he says, are also like family. “I can’t stress enough how much our volunteers mean to us.”

Future Projects: With help from his team, Shoates also set up a new pantry in Malaysia with a member of the Young Southeast Asia Initiative.

The pantry team also plans to share their organizational structure with food pantries at other universities that may find that they are not meeting some of their students’ needs.

—Lindsay Bernhards, BA ’18

Fall 2018 M A S O N S P I R I T | 43

CLASS NOTES

Alumnus Wins PULITZER PRIZE WASHINGTON POST VIDEO REPORTER Tom LeGro, BA English ’98, MFA Creative Writing ’01, was part of the newspaper team that revealed U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore’s alleged past sexual harassment of teenage girls and the subsequent efforts to undermine the reporting that exposed it. His team’s combined text and video entry won the Washington Post a 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.

LeGro describes his path to journalism as unusual. He considered a career in education but found that he clicked with Mason’s Creative Writing Program.

He particularly enjoyed the opportunity to study with professors whose writing he admired.

As an undergraduate, LeGro worked as a photo editor for the Broadside, Mason’s student newspaper (now known as IV Estate). In LeGro’s last year as a graduate student, a friend who worked at the Post suggested a part-time job with the sports desk. Jobs as a news aide, layout editor, and sports copy editor later followed.

He then worked with the PBS NewsHour, and when the show received a grant from the Poetry Foundation to cover poetry, LeGro found an opportunity to draw upon both his MFA studies and his journalistic skills. In 2013, the Washington Post launched a video initiative and he returned to the paper.

As an MFA graduate with a concentration in poetry, LeGro appreciates working in proximity to the editor of the Washington Post’s Book World, Ron Charles, where he has the opportunity to examine new publications of all kinds. And he notes that his wife, poet Hope Smith LeGro, MFA ’00, continues to write and present poetry.

As for advice for Mason students who might be aspiring journalists, LeGro says, “Concentrate your energy into things you care about and are passionate about.

Though you need to cover other things, that’s where your good work will come. … Focus, dive deep into that world.”

—Anne Reynolds

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class notes P H I B E TA K A P PA The following students were inducted into Mason’s chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, Omicron of Virginia, on May 8, 2018. Since the installation of Mason’s chapter in 2013, 804 students have been inducted. Ceremonies are held in May and December each year.

Suzanne Abribat, BA English Ricardo Angulo, BA Global Affairs and Criminology, Law, and Society Sabrine Baiou, BS Psychology Emma Beitzel, BFA Creative Writing Cristina Benzo, BS Atmospheric and Earth Science Enya Calibuso, BS Psychology and BA Foreign Languages Richard Catherina, BA History Hannah Cole, BA Conflict Analysis and Resolution and Global Affairs Edward Doherty, BA Govern­ ment and International Politics

Laurel Ferretti, BA Creative Writing Catherine Franklin, BA English Mary Freeman, BA Global Affairs Cameryn Gonnella, BA Communication and Integrative Studies Kira Greer, BA Psychology Jiajing Guan, BA Mathematics Camilla Higgins, BA Integrative Studies Faizah Hoque, BA Communication Ali Javaheri, BA Government and International Politics

Claire Dolan-Heitlinger, BA Global Affairs

Joshua Keruski, BA Government and International Politics

Elina Lukyanava Driscoll, BA Global Affairs

Hui Yong Kim, BA Global Affairs

Amber Dube, BA Global Affairs

Karlene Koh, BA Communication

Kelley Dugan, BA Integrative Studies

Bria Lloyd, BA Communication

Vincent Escobar, BA Government and International Politics Melissa Fangio, BA Integrative Studies

Elizabeth Mathews, BA History Brianna Nunez-Franklin, BA History and Government and International Politics Rachel Orga, BA Global Affairs and Foreign Languages Timothy O’Shea, BA Government and International Politics Kennis Pieper, BA Art History Jack Pope, BA Government and International Politics Ashlyn Rock, BA English, BM Music Nasser Samad, BA Global Affairs Seong Jae Shin, BS Conflict Analysis and Resolution Taylor Struzik, BA Government and International Politics Bong Suh, BS Biology Manfred Veizaga Claros, BA Communication

Curreen Luongo, BA Psychology

Ariana VelazquezMondragon, BA Art and Visual Technology

Rachel Martin, BA Psychology

Luke Waltermire, BA Sociology

Stefan Lopez, BA English

Diana Mateo, BA Sociology

1970s

Jim McCarthy, BS Public Administration ’75, has been appointed by Florida governor Rick Scott to the Environmental Regulation Commission, subject to confirmation by the Florida Senate.

1980s

Scott McGeary, JD ’82, will be inducted into the Arlington Business Hall of Fame, which honors individuals for a long record of successful manage­ment, expertise and business skills, and exceptional civic and community involvement.

McGeary represents the interests of Washington Gas before state and local government, business organizations, and com­ mu­nity groups.

Trina Kay Lewis, BA Speech Communication ’88, is the author of Bricks Without Straw: How Home­

schooling Can Make Your Role As a Christian Parent Easier, which offers insight into homeschooling children as an alternative to sending them to school.

1990s

Elisabeth Murawski, MFA Creative Writing ’91, is debuting her third book of poems, Heiress. A runnerup in the X. J. Kennedy Poetry contest last year, the book will be published

by Texas Review Press in the fall.

Paul J. Reagan, JD ’91, is one of Mason’s newest Board of Visitors members, appointed by Virginia governor Ralph Northam.

Reagan’s career has long been dedicated to Virginia government, including serving as chief of staff to former governor Terry McAuliffe, former senator Jim Webb, and former congressman Jim Moran.

He also served as com­mu­ (continued next page)

What’s New with You? We are interested in what you’ve been doing since you graduated.

Moved? Gotten married? Had a baby? Landed a new job? Received an award? Submit your class notes to alumni.gmu.edu/whatsnew. In your note, be sure to include your graduation year and degree.

Fall 2018 M A S O N S P I R I T | 45

DEAR FELLOW

Patriots I

t has been an active summer for Mason alumni. The Washington Nationals and D.C. United both hosted Mason nights—events that were well attended by alumni and public examples that Mason spirit is strong and active in the DMV area. Alumni outside of the area also gathered at local happy hours across the nation, or abroad, to cheer on our Mason men’s basketball team that traveled to Spain in August—signs that our community is growing and showing Patriot Pride everywhere.

Seeing the Student Apartments on the Fairfax Campus being taken down in July had me reminiscing about my student days living on campus. Robinson A and B—as we have known them—will be coming down and rebuilt, new and improved, in the near future.

Mason is ever growing and changing in dynamic ways. Our alumni are dynamic as well.

Just like the alumni exemplars who were recognized at the 50th Anniversary Gala and whom I was privileged to meet, Mason graduates achieve like no others. It makes me proud to be in their company as a member of a university community that doesn’t settle for the status quo.

As president, I hope to grow our alumni engagement by supporting new programming and opportunities to meet you where you live, work, and play. We are constantly eval­ uat­ing alumni activities to ensure quality and variety. I hope you were able to attend Alumni Weekend October 11-14. I heard many stories of reunions, networking connec­ tions, and learning experiences. It was wonderful to see old friends and make new ones—Patriots for life!

I look forward to seeing you all at some of our Patriot NCAA games on campus, which are a great way to show your alumni pride and see quality intercollegiate athletics and sportsmanship. Check out GoMason.com to follow your favorite sport. A calendar of alumni and community events can be found on alumni.gmu.edu. There is always something going on, and most events are open to the public, so bring a friend. I wel­ come your input and feedback on all things alumni at president@alumni.gmu.edu.

Together We Thrive, Jen Shelton, BS Public Administration ’94 President, George Mason University Alumni Association

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nications director to former governor (now U.S. Senator) Mark Warner and former congressman L. F. Payne. Currently, Rea­gan is senior vice president and director of federal public affairs at McGuire Woods Consulting in Washington, D.C. Wendy Deming, MBA ’92, is the new chief operating officer at the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sara­ sota, Florida. Deming, who has spent 18 years work­ ing with the Gulf Coast Community Foun­da­tion, will lead the orga­nization’s strategic operations as it prepares to launch the public phase of a $67 million capital campaign for a major renovation to the gardens campus.

Michelle Katz, BS Public Administration ’94, was selected to be a board mem­ber of the Netlok team, providing her expertise in health care and media.

Amy Schmitz, MFA Crea­ tive Writing ’97, won the Stevens Manuscript contest in April 2018 for her first collection of poems, Border Crossing, published by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies.

Joseph A. Esposito, MA History ’98, had his book Dinner in Camelot pub­ lished by Fore Edge in April 2018. The book focuses on a White House

dinner in April 1962 when the Kennedys hosted 49 Nobel Prize winners.

Esposito has served in three presidential administra­ tions, most recently as a deputy under secretary at the U.S. Department of Education. He lives in Virginia with his wife and two sons.

Karan Powell, PhD Education ’98, has been named interim vice presi­ dent for academic affairs at Saint Francis University.

Andrew Wheeler, MBA ’98, is the new acting administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), effective July 9, 2018. The Senate previously confirmed Wheeler to be the EPA’s deputy administrator.

Sheri Kent, BA Communication ’99, MA Telecommunications ’02, will debut her ninth book, The Little Unicorn, in September. Writing as Sheri Fink, she is the cocreator of the “Whimsical World” inspirational brand, which includes books, products, and experiences for children that also plant seeds of self-esteem. All five of her children’s books were No. 1 bestsellers, including The Little Rose, which was a No. 1 Amazon bestseller for more than 60 weeks, became the top-rated children’s

CLASS NOTES LET THERE BE LIGHTS

e-book on Amazon, and was adapted into a stage play.

Susan Landers, MFA Creative Writing ’99, is the new executive director of Lambda Literary, the nation’s leading LGBTQ+ literary organization. An author and editor, Landers recently published her third book, a hybrid work of poetry and prose about the racially diverse com­ mu­nity in Philadelphia where she grew up. She is grateful to the George Mason faculty, including Susan Tichy and Eric Pankey, who helped shape her as a poet.

Denise Turner Roth, BA Government and Politics ’99, Hon. DHL ’15, was recently appointed to serve on Mason’s Board of Visi­ tors by Virginia governor Ralph Northam. As a stu­ dent, Roth served on the Mason Student Council and was a member of the Mason Dance Team. In 2015, Roth was appointed by former U.S. president Barack Obama to lead the U.S. General Services Administration, a 12,000person agency with a $30 billion budget. That same year, Roth delivered Mason’s Winter Graduation address. Roth is now the chief development officer of WSP USA.

2000s

Tara Fitzpatrick-Navarro, BS Health, Fitness, and Recreational Resources ’01, is the CEO of the United States Tennis Association Mid-Atlantic Section, which recently announced it will move its head­quar­ ters to Prince William County, Virginia, and create a state-of-the-art tennis complex across from Mason’s Science and Technology Campus.

Deborah Willis, PhD Cultural Studies ’03, has been named the director of the Institute of African American Affairs at New York University.

Niyati S. Dhokai, BA Music ’04, the program manager of the Veterans and the Arts Initiative at the Hylton Performing Arts Center, was one of the exemplary women honored as a Change Maker of the Year at the Virginia Depart­ ment of Veterans Services summit “Change Makers & Trailblazers: The Power of Being a Woman, The Strength of Being a Veteran.”

Sarah Godlewski, BA Integrative Studies ’04, is a candidate for state treasurer of Wisconsin.

Godlewski previously worked for the U.S. Depart­ ment of Defense before

U

renna Onyewuchi, BS Electrical Engineering ’05, MS Electrical Engineering ’08, has been passionate about improving Africa’s access to reli­ able electricity from a young age.

“Access to electricity in Nigeria and the entire continent of Africa is very low: about 50 percent [have access] in Nigeria and 30 percent in Africa,” she says.

Originally from Houston, Texas, Onyewuchi attended kindergarten through high school in Nigeria, where she discovered her passion for mathematics and saw the need for greater access to reliable electricity. “My parents spent a lot on diesel for electricity from diesel gener­a­ tors that provided my siblings and I lighting and air conditioning to do our homework comfortably and succeed in school,” she says. “Electricity affects every aspect of life.”

Having since earned a PhD in electrical engineering at Georgia Tech, Onyewuchi has put her passion for science and mathematics into action as a senior mem­ ber of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and as steering committee chair of the IEEE IAS and PES’s Power Africa initiative. The initiative holds its Power and Energy Conference in Africa every year, bringing together experts and students in manufacturing, power and energy, academia, govern­ ment, banking, and more. Over the years, the initiative has held success­ful conferences in Zambia, Ghana, and South Africa.

Onyewuchi attributes the initiative’s success to her dedication, creativity, and Power Africa’s hardworking team members and volunteers. “I have been blessed with the most amazing teams, committees, and volunteers,” she says.

“We constantly accept new volunteers, both African and non-African, to help with this program.”

She and her IEEE Power Africa team organize programs that encourage young girls to pursue STEM-related studies and that partner with other programs to identify, fund, and train fledgling solar entrepreneurs in Africa. In the future, Onyewuchi wants to expand outreach initiatives to attract potential donors and increase awareness of electricity fundamentals and solutions in Africa.

She hopes that the initiative will also lead to greener power solutions.

“We are excited about where the program is now and where it is going,” she says.

—Lindsay Bernhards, BA ’18

(continued next page) Fall 2018 M A S O N S P I R I T | 47

CLASS NOTES

cofounding MaSa Partners, a social impact investment venture. She is currently co-chair of UNICEF USA’s Advocacy Leader­ship Group. While at Mason, she served as student body president and later taught as an adjunct professor.

Many Mason Millers

This summer Bill Miller, MFA Creative Writing ’87, retired from his role as director of Mason’s Creative Writing Program after 26 years. At the 2018 Commencement, his grandson Hagen Miller graduated from Mason with a BFA in creative writing, a degree program Bill helped create. Hagen’s graduation marked the third generation of alumni in the Miller family. Bill’s son Michael, BA Government and Politics ’92, and daughter-in-law Erin, BA English ’93, also attended Mason.

Rev. Frances J. Metcalf, BIS ’05, was ordained to the priesthood by the Right Rev. James L. Hobby, Bishop of the Anglican Church in North America Diocese of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on April 28, 2018, at Christ Church in New Brighton, Pennsylvania.

Mark Flanigan, MS New Professional Studies ’06, began a year of volunteer national service in July as an AmeriCorps VISTA member. He is serving with Imago Dei, a middle school in Tucson, Arizona, that serves low-income students from largely immigrant backgrounds.

Emily McKeown, BS Civil and Infrastructure Engi­ neering ’06, was promoted to associate department manager in the civil engineering group in Dewberry’s Gainesville office. She is also a pro­

2018 -19 G E O R G E M A SO N U N I V E R S IT Y A L U M N I A S S O C I AT I O N LAMBDA Aléjandro Asin, BA Sociology ’11

BOARD OF DIRECTORS PRESIDENT Jennifer Shelton, BS Public Administration ’94

Molly Grimsley, BA Art (Studio) ’81 Harry Hink, BS Physical Education ’85 Gleason Rowe, BA Global Affairs ’11

IMMEDIATE PAST PRESIDENT Brian Jones, MA International Commerce and Policy ’06

BLACK ALUMNI Chantée Christian, BA Communication ’05

SCHOOL OF BUSINESS Becky Anderson, BS Accounting ’10

COLLEGE OF EDUCATION AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT Anthony DeGregorio, BS Physical Education ’84, MS Physical Education ’89

SCHAR SCHOOL OF POLICY AND GOVERNMENT Colin Hart, MA International Transactions ’93

PRESIDENT-ELECT Sumeet Shrivastava, MBA ’94 VICE PRESIDENT Tyree Carlson, BS Social Work ’96 TREASURER Jeff Fissel, BS Information Technology ’06 HISTORIAN Mariana Cruz, BS Civil and Infrastructure Engineering ’11 AT-LARGE DIRECTORS Kevin Christopher, MBA ’96 Patrick Rooney, BA Communication ’12 Phil Abbruscato, BA Government and International Politics ’15

ALUMNI CHAPTER REPRESENTATIVES

COLLEGE OF VISUAL AND PERFORMING ARTS Shannon Baccaglini, MM ’06, MA Arts Management ’09 COLLEGE OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES Betty Ann Duffy, MSN Nursing Administration ’08 VOLGENAU SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING Rob Walters, BS Computer Science ’88

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ANTONIN SCALIA LAW SCHOOL Jesse Binnall, BA Communication ’01, JD ’09

LATINO Adriana Bonilla, BA Government and Politics ’11 COLLEGE OF SCIENCE Tiffany Ha, BS Chemistry ’10, MS ’13 COLLEGE OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES Ashley Phayme, BA Communication ’08 GOLDEN QUILL Kushboo Bhatia, BA Government and International Politics ’16

CLASS NOTES

fessional engineer in Virginia and is certified by the Virginia Department of Transportation in work zone traffic control.

Tom Snee, MEd Education Leadership ’06, was selected as Top Executive Director of the Year for 2018 by the International Association of Top Professionals and was honored with a Life­ time Achievement Award

by Strathmore’s Who’s Who Worldwide for his contributions in the fields of education and govern­ ment nonprofit associations.

Elizabeth Strom, BS Management ’06, started her own life-coaching company, Creative Calm Solutions LLC. She is a professional life/career coach, workshop facilitator, resume writer, and speaker.

Patrick Delaney, BA Communication ’07, accepted a new position as Democratic communica­ tions director with the House Agriculture Com­ mit­tee in Washington, D.C. Jay Ell Alexander, BA Communication ’08, was appointed the owner and CEO of the national running organization Black Girls RUN! Jona Colson, MA English ’08, won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from the Washington Writers’ Pub­ lishing House for his debut

poetry collection Said Through Glass, set to be published in October 2018.

Mike Maggio, MFA Creative Writing ’08, was elected for a third term as northern regional vice president for the Poetry Society of Virginia, a role that enables him to orga­ nize events and create opportunities for poets in the Northern Virginia area.

His most recent project was a collaboration of poets, artists, and musicians titled “Springtime in Winter,” which included original musical compo­ sitions by two composers, including Mason School of Music professor Jesse Guessford.

Brittney Dori de Jesus (Wilson) Rodrigues, BS Psychology ’08, got married on May 4, 2018, in Washington, D.C. Ian Summers, BA Com­ munication ’08, earned his PhD in communication from the University of Utah after being the 201718 University of Utah Graduate Research Fellow.

His doctoral research was made possible by grants from the Global Change and Sustainability Center, the American West Center, and the National Science Foundation. Prior to receiving his doctorate, Summers received his

UN PEACE ENVOY

A

s a United Nations senior mediation adviser, Tatsushi Arai, PhD Conflict Analysis and Resolution ’05, is on call to negotiate with world leaders and conflict parties at a moment’s notice.

He was selected from a global pool of 400 candidates to join the small multinational team of mediation experts. Arai credits Mason’s School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (S-CAR) and his extensive experience in the conflict field as preparing him for the position.

While a career in academia remained essential for Arai, practice in the field was equally important to him. He had already established himself as an accomplished practitioner with extensive experience for Japanese and international nongovernment organizations in Africa.

After earning his PhD at Mason, Arai spent well over a decade in applied peacemaking, working in Nigeria, Lebanon, Myanmar, and Afghanistan, as well as on a Sino-Japan conflict in the South China Sea with fellow Mason alumnus Zheng Wang, PhD Conflict Analysis and Resolution ’05.

“In fact, I worked in more than 20 different countries,” Arai says. “The reason why they offered me the position is because of my cumulative experience and some of the most difficult conflict situations I have been in.”

“This is a very prestigious appointment,” says S-CAR dean Kevin Avruch. “Tats, as we call him, was chosen after a rigorous selection process. One of his skills is to work with policymakers and political leaders at high levels of government. They respect his experience and knowledge, along with a gentle demeanor that belies a fierce commitment to peace and nonviolence.”

Being what he called “a peace envoy for the world” is as rewarding as he hoped, maybe more so.

“It’s a wonderful experience to be able to have your knowledge translated into concrete opportunities where world leaders of action hear your ideas,” he says.

—Buzz McClain, BA ’77

Hear Arai discuss his work in this TEDx Talk at bit.ly/TatsArai.

(continued next page) Fall 2018 M A S O N S P I R I T | 49

CLASS NOTES

master’s from the Univer­ sity of Alabama and worked in political consulting in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles.

Save the Date 2019 HOMECOMING Saturday, February 23 homecoming.gmu.edu

POINT OF PRIDE

98th

Mason is ranked among the top 300 colleges and universities, a jump of 13 spots from last year, in Forbes’ annual “Best Value Colleges” rankings.

Monica Hawkins, PhD Environmental Science ’09, published the book Raising Boys Into Extraordinary Young Men. The book is the blueprint that she used to raise her son to be an artic­ u­late, self-confident, intelli­ gent, and extraordi­nary young man and leader.

Hawkins’s goal is to inspire other parents to raise their sons with similar attributes.

Hawkins earned a master of public health from the George Washington Uni­ver­­­ sity and a bachelor of sci­ ence degree from Howard University.

2010s

Kim Cone, BS Earth Sci­ ence ’10, completed her MS in geology from the Colorado School of Mines in spring 2018. Her focus was on crystallization kinetics through crystal size distributions of Ice­ landic basalts using auto­ mated SEM-based methods.

She is currently working on her PhD in lunar petro­ genesis and planetary geology.

Ashlea Smith, BA Govern­ ment and International Politics ’10, joined Gersh­ man, Brickner & Bratton Inc., an international solid waste management con­ sulting firm based in McLean, Virginia, as their marketing coordinator. Bringing 10 years of experience in solid waste, recycling, and environmental consulting to the firm, Smith is look­ ing forward to working alongside this team of thought leaders as they help both public and pri­ vate sector clients solve their complex solid waste challenges.

Diana Karczmarczyk, PhD Education ’13, and Courtney Gonzalez, BS Community Health ’16, have written the children’s book It’s GREAT to be YOU! The book is about children of many backgrounds, inter­ ests, and abilities, and it emphasizes that all child­ren are important and valued.

Lydia Mullins Hart, BS Management ’14, cele­ brated the publication of a young adult chapter book, A Princess in Disguise, by her daughter, April Michelle Davis.

Dennis Nolasco, BA English ’14, MEd Curricu­lum and

Instruction ’17, was award­ ed an Exemplary Early Career Teacher award from the Apple Federal Credit Union Education Foundation.

Alexander Schwengler, BS Economics ’15, and Anthony Travieso launched Sight Supply, a contact lens subscription service. The former Mason roommates were weary of the expense and hassle of ordering contact lenses, so they decided to start their own company to fix these problems in the market.

For each box of contacts sold by Sight Supply, a dollar is donated to See International, a charity dedicated to curing pre­ ventable blindness around the world.

Harley Roth, BS Biology ’16, earned her MPH in infectious diseases and microbiology manage­ ment, intervention, and community practice from the University of Pitts­ burgh Graduate School of Public Health.

Kimberly Eve O’Bryan, MEd Education Leadership ’16, and Eric Wayne Stewart were married Saturday, December 9, 2017, at Holladay House in Orange, Virginia.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Class Notes are submitted by alumni and are not verified by the editors. While we welcome alumni news, Mason Spirit is not responsible for information contained in Class Notes.

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CLASS NOTES

Obituaries

Virginia Hammett, MEd Elementary Education ’72, d. May 27, 2018

Gerald Walker, BA Psychology ’86, d. May 23, 2018

James Parker, BA English ’72, d. June 16, 2018

Scott Kazem, BS Finance ’87, JD ’01, d. May 25, 2018

Bekki King, BA Sociology ’76, d. May 19, 2018

Dawn Markwood, BSEd Vocational Education ’90, d. April 22, 2018

Carroll Hackett, MBA ’80, d. April 24, 2018

Christopher Robertson, BS Accounting ’94, d. May 18, 2018

Jean Halsey, MEd Special Education ’80, d. April 25, 2018

Elaine Waybright, PhD Information Technology ’94, d. March 12, 2018

Thomas Scanlan, JD ’80, d. June 19, 2018

Jin Kim, BSN ’95, d. April 20, 2018

Richard Joseph Fortwengler, MBA ’81, d. May 20, 2018

Dennis Mannion, BS Public Administration ’95, d. May 2, 2018

Anne McCarthy, MBA ’82, d. June 5, 2018

Roy Seguine, BS Computer Science ’96, d. May 10, 2018

Clara Gannon, BS Management ’85, d. June 26, 2018

Peggy Gibino, BIS ’98, d. June 12, 2018

Carolyn Carlson, BIS ’86, d. April 25, 2018

Kaeley Brady, BA Communication ’16, d. May 3, 2018

Dorothy Coffman, BS Social Work ’86, d. May 31, 2018

F A C U LT Y, S TA F F, A N D F R I E N D S James E. Byrne, Antonin Scalia Law School faculty member, passed away on July 1 at the age of 72 while battling cancer. Byrne received his BA from the University of Notre Dame, his JD from Stetson University College of Law, and his LLM from the University of Pennsylvania. He later practiced law and then taught at Stetson before beginning his teaching career at Mason in 1982. He remained a faculty member at the school for more than 30 years. He was the director of the Institute of International Banking Law and Practice, which he founded in 1987, and of the International Center for Letter of Credit Arbitration. Byrne is survived by his wife, daughter, sons, and grandsons.

Susan A. Collins, former senior associate athletic director with Mason Athletics, died on August 10. In 1981, she became the assistant athletic director at Mason, her first position in a long career in athletic admin­ istration at Mason Athletics. During her 34 years at Mason, she oversaw the addition of six new sport programs, began an academic support program for student-athletes, and was named the first senior women’s administrator—a position created by the NCAA to ensure the involve­ ment of women in leading and managing college sports. She was also a member of many committees within the NCAA, including the NCAA Board of Governors and the NCAA Division I Council. Following Collins’s retirement, Mason Athletics created the Susan A. Collins Leadership Award, which is given annually to a Mason athlete who models the same qualities of leadership that Collins exemplified.

Dennis Sandole, professor of conflict resolution and international relations at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (S-CAR), died at the age of 77 on May 4. Sandole was a founding member of S-CAR and helped in its development from a small master’s degree program to a prestigious teaching program in conflict analysis and resolution.

Sandole was also S-CAR’s first-ever teaching appointment. Prior to working at Mason, Sandole received his PhD in politics at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1979. He was also a William C.

Foster Fellow as Visiting Scholar with the U.S. Arms Control and Disarma­ ment Agency, where he worked on the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe negotiations. He wrote numerous publications and completed a Fulbright Scholarship to teach in postgraduate programs in inter­ national studies at the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna, Austria.

John M. Toups died on June 14 at the age of 92. A long-time supporter of Mason, Toups began his career as a practicing civil engineer and even­ tually became president, CEO, and chair of Planning Research Corpora­ tion, from which he later retired. Voted 2013’s Washingtonian of the Year by the Washingtonian, Toups was chair of the George Mason University Foundation’s Board of Trustees and was honored with the university’s highest honor, the George Mason Medal, in 2006. He helped create the John Toups Medal for Excellence in Teaching, which is awarded annually to Mason faculty whose teaching is of the highest caliber. Most recently, Toups and his wife, Nina, made a gift to the Sid and Reva Dewberry Department of Civil, Environmental, and Infrastruc­ ture Engineering for a teaching lab that is named after him. Toups is survived by his wife, four children, six grandchildren, two greatgrandchildren, two sisters, and many nieces and nephews.

Stanley Zoltek, director of online education for the College of Science and an associate professor of computational and data sciences, passed away on February 25. After graduating with a PhD in mathematics from SUNY Stony Brook in 1976, he joined Mason in 1980 as an assistant pro­ fessor of mathematics. During his 38 years at Mason, he was affiliated with a number of academic departments and university endeavors, including serving as the inaugural director of information technology and computing when the College of Science was formed in 2006. Despite his physical challenges, Zoltek was a long-term member of the Faculty Senate and worked diligently to provide an enriched learning experi­ ence for students and a better working community for his colleagues.

Fall 2018 M A S O N S P I R I T | 51

4400 University Drive, MS 3B3 Fairfax, VA 22030

IT’S THUNDER RAT TO THE RESCUE—Armed with a camera, lights, and a water-resistant chassis, the custom-made robot—designed by mechanical engineering majors for their senior capstone project—is meant to assist Mason’s Facilities Management employees with inspecting the university’s storm drain system. The reason: It’s often difficult to pinpoint precisely where drains are clogged, which can lead to costly excavations and disrupt campus activity.

PHOTOS BY EVAN CANTWELL