IMPACT No. 6 | 2020-2021

SCHOLARSHIP, CREATIVITY, & COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT TRINITY UNIVERSITY 2020-2021

LOFT Y GOA LS Trinity-founded institute aims to unite Hispanic student leaders nationwide + Cowles Distinguished Professor of Biology describes new species of marmoset + English professor uses Fulbright Fellowship to link American and Irish students

Every day we have the choice to embrace the opportunity of a new day to be lived, enjoyed, and made meaningful.

– President Danny J. Anderson, Ph.D. august 2021 community message

Contents / NO. 6, 2021-2022

10 C R E ATI N G A RT FR OM ART American and Irish students share unique poetic perspectives on Rembrandt’s artwork by ashley festa

24 COMP L E X D I SCOV E RY Biology professor describes new species of Amazonian primate by jeanna goodrich balreira ’08

o.

N 6 Departments

2 LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT

40

3 RESEARCH AND ACHIEVEMENT 16 ARTS AND HUMANITIES 28 SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, AND MATHEMATICS 44 BUSINESS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES 52 STAFF 56 A NOTE FROM THE VICE PRESIDENT FOR ACADEMIC AFFAIRS

LO FTY GOA L S Trinity-founded Institute aims to unite Hispanic student leaders nationwide by jeremy gerlach

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SCHOLARSHIP, CREATIVITY, & COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

2020-2021 EDITORIAL BOARD Jeanna Goodrich Balreira ’08 / Editor Molly Mohr Bruni / Managing Editor Jeremy Gerlach / Writer

Laura Kaples / Graphic Designer

David Ribble ’82 / Associate Vice President for

Academic Affairs & Professor of Biology Armando Saliba / Director of Sponsored Research Carla Sierra / Writer ADVISORY COMMITTEE Victoria Aarons / English

Angela Breidenstein ’91, M’92 / Education Jane Costanza / Library

Jason Johnson / History

Lisa Jasinski / Academic Affairs

Catherine Kenyon / Director of Foundation

Relations

Carl Leafstedt / Music

Patrick Shay ’03, M’05 / Health Care Administration

Heather Sullivan / Modern Languages and Literatures Adam Urbach / Chemistry

Harry Wallace / Psychology INTERNS Madeline Freeman ’23 / Writing Intern Matilda Krell ’23 / Writing Intern

Sydney Rhodes ’23 / Writing Intern

Brian Yancelson ’23 / Public Relations Intern

PRESIDENT Danny J. Anderson

IMPACT is published annually by the Office of Strategic Communications and Marketing and is sent to faculty, staff, and friends of the University.

EDITORIAL OFFICES Trinity University Strategic Communications and Marketing One Trinity Place San Antonio, TX 78212-7200 Email: impact@trinity.edu Phone: 210-999-8406 Fax: 210-999-8449

READ IMPACT ONLINE: trinity.edu/impact-magazine

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IMPACT 2020-2021

Trinity University Community, Please enjoy our latest copy of IMPACT magazine, which profiles the incredible work of our exceptional faculty engaged in nationally and internationally recognized research and scholarship. When I look at these achievements, I am reminded how they support Trinity’s mission of enduring excellence, intentional inclusion, and perpetual discovery.

Juan Sepúlveda, Calgaard Distinguished Professor of Practice in the Department of Political Science, graces the front cover of this issue. Just recently, he accepted a new role as the President’s special adviser for inclusive excellence. As such, he will manage and coordinate campus-wide programming that promotes diversity and fosters inclusion and access for students, employees, alumni, and other stakeholders.

Juan has a track record of implementing successful diversity and inclusion initiatives, including the inaugural class of the LOFT (Latinx On Fast Track) Leadership Institute. This program engages top Latinx students from around the country in an interactive, summer-long curriculum that focuses on leadership, community-building, professional networking, social impact, and culture.

Meanwhile, Tomas Hrbek, Trinity’s Cowles Distinguished Professor of Biology, co-led a team of researchers that discovered the Schneider’s Marmoset, one of the world’s newest-identified species. Faced with the ever-present deforestation of the Amazon, Tomas and his fellow researchers are exploring ways to protect this furtive primate.

English professor Jenny Browne proves that excellence at Trinity endures even in the midst of the pandemic. When COVID-19 cut short her Fulbright Distinguished Fellowship at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland, she brought her project to San Antonio for Trinity and Queen’s students to sink their teeth into.

These research opportunities are a hallmark that sets Trinity apart, along with a faculty that is committed to interdisciplinarity. Our faculty is engaged in grants and awards from leading entities, including the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Welch Foundation, just to name a few.

For more than 150 years, the University has provided its students with an exceptional liberal arts education. That could not happen without our highly engaged faculty. I invite you to help me celebrate their accomplishments.

Warmly,

Danny J. Anderson President, Trinity University

Research / GRANTS AND AWARDS

GROUNDBREAKING RESEARCH External grants and awards are a prestigious and valuable acknowledgement of a faculty member’s intellectual achievements and promise. Faculty members from all disciplines apply for funding from institutions, foundations, consortia, and government agencies.

Faculty or Academic Staff with Grant Awards, 2014-21

Rolling Average of Expenditures from All Externally Sponsored Sources, 2017-21 $18 mil $16,744,574

$16 mil $14,435,077

$14 mil $12 mil $10 mil

$10,951,357

$8 mil $6 mil

Between 2014-21, 110 members of the faculty or academic staff held at least one grant award.

$4 mil $2 mil

$4,808,359

$4,854,271

2018-20

2019-21

$3,650,452

$0 2017-19

(that’s about

of Trinity’s full-time faculty members)

Source: Office of Sponsored Research, October 2021

Total Expenditures (3-year rolling average)

Average per-year expenditures

Source: Office of Sponsored Research, October 2021 Given the cyclical nature of grant awards, expenditures are calculated using a rolling average that includes the current year and previous two fiscal years. Externally sponsored sources include grants, contracts, and agreements from federal and state agencies, businesses, nonprofit organizations, other universities, etc. It does not include restricted or unrestricted gifts.

Active Grants and Contracts Managed by the Office of Sponsored Research, 2018-21

Number of Proposals Submitted by the Office of Sponsored Research, 2020-21

100 91

90 80 70

70

75

74

Fiscal Year 2020

Fiscal Year 2021

proposals

proposals

60 50

45

48

45

40 0

36 2018

2019

Number of active grants and contracts managed

2020

2021

Number of faculty with at least one managed award

Source: Office of Sponsored Research, October 2021

Source: Office of Sponsored Research, October 2021

The number of active grants and contracts is measured at the end of the fiscal year.

The number of submitted proposals is measured at the end of the fiscal year.

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Achievement / FACULTY RECOGNITION

DISTINGUISHED ACHIEVEMENT Trinity University faculty members are gifted teachers and advisers who have dedicated themselves to working closely with students in and out of the classroom. This year, numerous outstanding members of the Trinity faculty were honored for distinguished achievement in service, teaching, advising, mentorship, and research.

Z.T. SCOTT AWARD

Honors the top educator at Trinity Carey Latimore / History

PRESIDENT’S AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN STUDENT ADVOCACY

Recognizes support for student success in and out of the classroom

Latimore, professor and chair of the Department of History, won Trinity’s most prestigious faculty award, the Dr. and Mrs. Z.T. Scott Faculty Fellowship, for his consistent contributions to the University and for his enduring enthusiasm and success as a mentor and educator. Latimore’s teaching focuses on the African American experience and Black history in the U.S., and he is currently conducting research examining the history of African Americans in San Antonio.

Benjamin Sosnaud / Sociology and Anthropology Sosnaud was nominated for this award by multiple students who felt he promotes a culture of learning that both maintains high expectations and provides the resources and support to succeed.

Shannon Twumasi / Student Life As the coordinator for student programs, Twumasi was nominated for her strong advocacy for marginalized students and her equity-minded work to ensure that all students are heard, giving them a voice and platform to share their passions and interests.

“BEST OF THE BEST” AWARDS

TRINITY TOMORROW AWARDS

Recognizes exceptional contributions to teaching, scholarship or creative work, and service

Recognizes significant contributions to Trinity’s educational mission

Jennifer Henderson / Communication

Glenn Kroeger / Geosciences

Corina Maeder ’99 / Chemistry

Mark Lewis ’96 / Computer Science

Jennifer Mathews / Sociology and Anthropology

Jennifer Rowe / Academic Support

Shana McDermott / Economics

Katherine Troyer / Collaborative for Learning and Teaching

Eddy Kwessi / Mathematics Andrew Kania / Philosophy Heather Sullivan / Modern Languages and Literatures Erin Sumner / Human Communication and Theatre Ben Surpless / Geosciences Carolyn True / Music

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Rita Urquijo-Ruiz / Modern Languages and Literatures

Achievement / FACULTY RECOGNITION

MENTORSHIP AND MERIT

Recognizes distinguished achievement in teaching, advising, and research

Christina Cooley / Chemistry Distinguished Research and Teaching by an Early Career Faculty Member Cooley was recognized as an enthusiastic teacher who infuses the classroom with energy. She has mentored more than a dozen research students at Trinity and has obtained funding from many organizations for her research, including a recent National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program grant.

Lauren Turek / History Distinguished Research and Teaching by an Early Career Faculty Member Turek employs an innovative mix of pedagogical tools that foster student-centered success and promote inclusivity. Alongside publishing work that has been praised as rigorous and insightful, Turek has created a public history internship, directs an interdisciplinary minor in museum studies, and also directs the Mellon Initiative, which supports undergraduate research in the humanities and the arts.

Dania Abreu-Torres / Modern Languages and Literatures Distinguished Advising Abreu-Torres is regarded by students and colleagues as a tireless advocate for student success and for opportunities within and beyond the classroom. She advises Spanish, international studies, and global Latinx studies majors in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. She says the advising process is important in making students understand that they aren’t just a number—they matter, and their plans for the future matter.

Amy Stone / Sociology and Anthropology Distinguished University, Community, and Professional Service Stone has a long history of community-based research in the LGBTQ+ community of San Antonio. They have also served as co-chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies faculty advisory committee at Trinity and as faculty adviser of the Trinity LGBTQ+ student group PRIDE. Stone served as the deputy editor of the journal Gender & Society, and they have been heavily involved in the Sociology of Sexualities section of the American Sociological Association.

Maria Pía Paganelli / Economics Distinguished Scholarship, Research, or Creative Work or Activity Specializing in Adam Smith, David Hume, and other theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment, Paganelli works to understand how self-interest interacts with other motivational drives, with systematic biases, and with the surrounding institutional environment. She has an extensive publication and presentation list, and she is the current president of the International Adam Smith Society and president-elect of the History of Economics Society.

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Achievement / FACULTY RECOGNITION

DEPARTMENT CHAIRS COLLABORATE ON DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS Chairs seek to improve curriculum and teaching methods

by Matilda Krell ’23

Trinity University’s academic department chairs juggle several responsibilities. They act as the representatives, spokespeople, administrators, and facilitators of learning. Across the country, academic department chairs often feel underprepared for their roles, which is why Trinity created a program meant to remedy this issue. In March 2020, the University received a $275,000 grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. The grant provides funds for ED CLIC, which stands for Empowering Department Chairs to Lead and Implement Change, through May 2022. ED CLIC intends to empower department chairs to develop their leadership capacity while addressing institutional needs. For the 10 department chairs in the program, components of ED CLIC include working with a professional coach, attending 20 professional development sessions, and developing change initiative projects with their coaches and colleagues.

“The ED CLIC grant is framed around ‘change projects,’ and in geosciences, this work is part of the long-term evolution of our program,” says Kathleen Surpless, Ph.D., chair of the geosciences department.

The department chairs involved in the program are encouraged to share their insights with their colleagues to foster interdisciplinary development.

Surpless is one of 10 Trinity department chairs participating in the inaugural cohort of ED CLIC. Her project is designed to improve and expand teaching methods within the geosciences department, in addition to removing barriers to student success.

“The ED CLIC grant allowed us to bring in workshop leaders and facilitators to help us develop tools and strategies for improving our teaching and classroom environment, with the goal of helping all students thrive in our courses and our program,” she says.

Geosciences chair Kathleen Surpless examines samples in her lab.

The program is helping the geosciences department build on improvement projects they have been working on for a long time. For example, under Surpless’s leadership the department spent three years revising its curriculum, a change that went into effect in Fall 2020.

The ED CLIC grant could not have come at a better time for the geosciences department (or Trinity as a whole), as the outbreak of COVID-19 in March 2020 disrupted many ongoing departmental projects.

“The coaching and professional development that ED CLIC has provided, including concrete tools and tactics for handling challenging aspects of the leadership role, helped me navigate through the anxiety and uncertainty of leading during the pandemic,” Surpless says.

The department chairs selected for ED CLIC are: Jane Childers, Ph.D. / Psychology Andrew Hansen, Ph.D. / Human Communication and Theatre Bruce Holl, Ph.D. / Modern Languages and Literatures Laura Hunsicker-Wang, Ph.D. / Chemistry Jennifer Mathews, Ph.D. / Sociology and Anthropology 6

IMPACT 2020-2021

Chris Nolan, Ph.D. / Library Julie Persellin, Ph.D. / Accounting Ed Schumacher, Ph.D. / Health Care Administration Jennifer Steele, Ph.D. / Physics and Astronomy Kathleen Surpless, Ph.D. / Geosciences

Achievement / FACULTY RECOGNITION

Benjamin Sosnaud and Rachel Kaufman ’22 discuss their Summer 2021 undergraduate research project.

SOCIAL SCHOLARS SCOUR STATISTICS More than 50 Tiger faculty dive into Summer 2021 research projects and 2021-22 academic leaves

by Sydney Rhodes ’23

Who needs fancy instruments or lab coats to do research? Instead, sociology professor Benjamin Sosnaud, Ph.D, and Rachel Kaufman ’22 conducted their research last summer from their laptops—but don’t let their presence behind a screen fool you. You’d be hardpressed to find two people as passionate about the work they’re doing to explore social factors as determinants of health.

Sosnaud was one of just 19 faculty members awarded a $9,000 summer stipend by the Faculty Development Committee of Academic Affairs in 2021. The purpose of this award is to encourage faculty to develop research projects, intensive scholarly activities, and original works in the creative and performing arts.

Sosnaud used his stipend to research with Kaufman on a highly relevant topic. Their work last summer examined data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and various counties to determine what factors are influencing disparities in mortality across U.S. counties amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

“A lot of the predictions that social scientists have and the theories we have about the social determinants of health—how your income matters, how people in disadvantaged neighborhoods access care, how people are affected by structural racism or discrimination—all those factors matter for health and are manifesting themselves in this pandemic,” Sosnaud says. “We thought it would be a perfect opportunity to not just describe what’s happened, but also evaluate how well these theories we had before the pandemic actually predict the outcomes we’ve seen.”

Their hope is that their research can be used to prevent negative effects of health disparities in the future.

An additional 34 faculty members were awarded an academic leave from the Faculty Development Committee of Academic Affairs for the 2021-22 academic year, totaling more than 50 Tiger faculty who were granted stipends or leaves from the committee.

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At the first annual Humanities Book Day in December 2021, the Trinity community celebrated 25 recent book publications in the humanities fields from 19 Trinity faculty members.

top Words from “& Even the Cows” by Mackenzie Cook ‘23 right “The Adoration of the Shepherds: with the lamp” by Rembrandt background Glenn Marshall’s artificial intelligence visual blends Rembrandt’s sketch with Cook’s poem

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CREATING art FROM art American and Irish students share unique poetic perspectives on Rembrandt’s artwork

by Ashley Festa

A

t a time when a global pandemic ruined so many plans—including Jenny Browne’s Fulbright Distinguished Scholar Fellowship to Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland—the Trinity University English professor created a unique opportunity for her students to bring more beauty into the world.

Just four months into Browne’s nine-month fellowship, the U.S. Department of State suspended all Fulbright grants worldwide. She came home to San Antonio, but she wasn’t finished with her project just yet. Since her time teaching at the prestigious Seamus Heaney Centre in Belfast was cut short, instead she brought her project to Trinity students as an upper division course of special topics in creative writing. The topic of her Fulbright research and the resulting student course?

Ekphrastic poetry. trinity.edu/impact-magazine IMPACT

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The Ulster Museum in Belfast, Northern Ireland, debuted a physical exhibit called A Unique Silence to celebrate six Rembrandt etchings recently gifted to the museum. The exhibit moved online after the pandemic shuttered its doors.

Poems by Trinity University and Queen’s University Belfast students were published in a booklet titled A Unique Silence: Poems of the Ulster Museum, which complemented a film of the same name.

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IMPACT 2020-2021

“Ekphrasis is a poetic genre, and the origins of the word mean to ‘speak out,’” Browne, MFA, says. “Traditionally, it’s a poem written in response to another art form and describes it so exactly and elaborately so as to recreate the visual.”

Browne views contemporary ekphrasis as an opportunity to address larger issues, such as politics, violence, gender, sexuality, and race, by considering issues of visual and verbal representation. She created the class for Trinity students because she recognized that it could be a useful poetic practice to express difficult feelings during a year full of uncertainties. Ideally, the class would have been in the field—students would visit museums and anywhere else art was on display.

But the pandemic shuttered all those doors.

Browne and her students found themselves on Zoom for Spring 2021 classes, and while everyone felt the loss of presence, they seized an unusual opportunity—located more than 4,500 miles away at the Ulster Museum in Belfast.

“As I was leaving Belfast, there was a big show of six donated Rembrandt etchings, but when everything shut down, it had to be online,” Browne says. “I talked to the curator— wouldn’t it be interesting to have two groups of students respond to the etchings and then share their responses?

We would be looking at the same thing, but the process of writing into what we saw, felt, and imagined was such an exciting way to enlarge the conversation about ekphrastic poetry. It brought together individual perspectives across the ocean.”

During the project, those two groups of students—one group at Trinity and the other at Queen’s—closely observed the Rembrandt etchings displayed at the Ulster Museum in an online exhibition called A Unique Silence. Browne asked students to choose one of the pieces: “Which one strikes you speechless? That intake of air when you encounter something—that’s a different kind of unique silence.”

Jenny Browne (right) returned to Belfast, Ireland, in the summer to help Queen’s University Belfast students film A Unique Silence: Poems of the Ulster Museum.

Then, both groups of literary students responded to the visual art, interpreting the etching for themselves as much as for others.

“Ekphrasis is a practice that really makes one think: What does it mean to be in your own body looking at a piece of art?” says Ciara Keogh ’22, an English major who wrote the poem “Study of a Female Nude,” reflecting on Dwight C. Sturges’ etching of the same name. Keogh also appreciated looking at art through other people’s eyes.

“Now I realize how much of my perspective on the world is informed by being an American and living here,” Cook says. “These students were informed by a different history, and they had questions about my work that I had never questioned before.”

Culminating the project, all the students recorded themselves reading their poems to create a short film called A Unique Silence: Poems of the Ulster Museum. To accompany the readings, Belfast computer artist and animator Glenn

“If you’re writing ekphrasis, part of what you’re doing is paying attention to what you see—your eye is the camera.”

“Some of the Queen’s students’ experiences are drastically different from mine, so they had unique perspectives that I could compare to mine when looking at the same piece of art,” Keogh says.

Mackenzie “Macks” Cook ’23, an English major, wrote “& Even the Cows,” responding to Rembrandt’s “The Adoration of the Shepherds: with the lamp” etching as well as Gwendolen Mary Raverat’s “Nativity.” Like Keogh, Cook also appreciated the non-American lens the Queen’s students provided in their feedback to Trinity students.

Marshall provided an additional interpretation—that of the visual image. Marshall had developed a text-to-image generator that manipulates a piece of art to reflect words, either written or spoken. The computer program used artificial intelligence to listen to the students’ poetry and then visually transform the corresponding art, animating the image to reflect the words in each poem.

For example, in Cook’s poem, the repetition of the words “twin eyes” and “twin heads” was reflected in the animation—showing dual cow faces again and again. In trinity.edu/impact-magazine IMPACT

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“Art hanging in a museum is not static; it is being interacted with by viewers who come with their own realities that the artwork fits into.” other poems, the words “shadow” or “light” would produce certain contrast changes in the image.

“What I loved about that aspect of the film is the way these animations evoked the experience of looking and thinking,” Browne says. “If you’re writing ekphrasis, part of what you’re doing is paying attention to what you see— your eye is the camera. What was so beautiful about these animations is the way they echoed the original experience of encountering and taking in the prints. It was an experimental ekphrasis experience.”

Keogh agreed that the images were an incredible addition to the exhibit.

“I thought the idea of coming full circle with these images felt satisfying and cohesive,” says Keogh, a self-described visual learner who appreciated the intersection of literary and visual art. “I looked at a piece of art through the lens of my life experiences and created poetry with just words and spaces. Then an artist took those words and went back to turning the shared conception of this art into an image again. Overall, the process to language and back again enriched the experience of the piece of artwork.”

A Second Voyage

With support from the Trinity Public Humanities Fellows program, Browne was able to travel back to Belfast for a month this past summer. In addition to assisting in the recording of the Queen’s students’ poetry for the film, she also focused on finding ways to make art, particularly poetry, more accessible to the public. She worked with the Ulster Museum to create public programs and curriculum to give non-artists the tools to creatively respond to works in the collection. It’s a project she’s continuing to develop to help museum visitors “dip their toe in” to the poetic tradition.

“So often we ask: What does it mean?” Browne says. “We look for an expert, but part of the question of ekphrasis is, what does it mean to you? What you see in a certain image is determined by who you are and how you see yourself.

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That question is available to people who aren’t necessarily poets and artists.”

This understanding—that “art is a conversation”—was Keogh’s biggest takeaway from Browne’s class.

“Art hanging in a museum is not static; it is being interacted with by viewers who come with their own realities that the artwork fits into. Or maybe it won’t fit with their preconceived notions, so they have to interrogate both their own thoughts and the art itself,” explains Keogh, who says she now has new creative tools to use to experiment with form and convention in her writing. “Ekphrastic poetry allows viewers to become part of the artistic world and explore their conversation with an artwork.”

Through this exploration of ekphrasis, Cook also gained a new perspective of what it means to be original.

“I get hung up on originality sometimes,” Cook says.

“If it doesn’t come fully from me and my brain, is it really mine? Through this project, I learned to seek inspiration from other sources.”

Students discovered, too, that those sources could be anything and come from anywhere—at home or abroad— even when travel was next to impossible.

“The pandemic was a lonely time, but through this project, we got to talk to these people who were doing this in a different place and a different context,” Browne says. “It was exciting to have an international exchange element to it, especially when our lives felt really small and condensed and shriveled. I’m proud of my students and thrilled with the product and also with the practice we made together.”

View the collaborative student film, A Unique Silence: Poems of the Ulster Museum, at gotu.us/UniqueSilence.

AI interpretations of “Study of a Female Nude” by Dwight C. Sturges, based on Ciara Keogh’s poem of the same name.

STUDY OF A FEMALE NUDE

by Ciara Keogh ’22

“Study of a female nude,” Dwight Case Sturges (1874-1940), ink on paper. ©National Museums NI Collection: Ulster Museum

Empty space filled with Shadow the dark outlining her form she stretches

We lose the ones who Are absent from our museums Their stories untold

Ghost of a smile A stray lock of hair, soft curves Observe quiet dark

Names immortal on Lips curved, wet with saltwater Not enough to save

Face value or worth Lies without the hand that shades Only reflection

Empty space filled with Shadow the dark outlining The artist, missing

She lights up a room Dusk following in her wake A step from darkness

Pencil left behind Destined for a show unseen For a year long gone

In mind, body, soul What does it mean to be dark?

When is it allowed?

Remembered fondly Why do some deaths matter more?

News story gravestones

Empty space filled with Shadow the dark outlining A form on the floor

Mural monuments No scholars devote to those Their studies narrow

No longer sleeping Twenty-six, we say her name Still seeking justice

Choosing instead a Study of a female nude

Where can we find them?

Justice and sanctuary Here, they are missing

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Modern languages and literatures professor Norma E. Cantú, Ph.D., co-published Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa: Pedagogy and Practice for Our Classrooms and Communities with the University of Arizona Press in 2020.

Works / ARTS AND HUMANITIES

ARTS and HUMANITIES Through research and scholarship in the arts and humanities at Trinity University, faculty explore human imagination, creativity, and expression. Faculty direct plays and uncover their historic meanings, compose music and analyze its meter and rhyme, and create art and delve into its cultural impact.

At Trinity, arts and humanities departments include Art and Art History, Classical Studies, English, History, Human Communication and Theatre, the Library, Modern Languages and Literatures, Music, Philosophy, and Religion.

VICTORIA AARONS / English published “‘Sometimes your memories are not your own’: The Graphic Turn and the Future of Holocaust Representation” in Humanities, 2020, Vol. 9, Special Issue 4 and “Reinventing Philip Roth in the Fiction of Others” in Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines (French Association for American Studies), 2021, Vol. 1, Issue 166.

Aarons contributed “Teaching Holocaust Literature in the 21st Century” for Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust with the University of Wisconsin Press and “Writing during the Pandemic” for Creating Under Corona with The Arnold and Leona Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research, both in 2020.

Aarons contributed “‘Master Race’: Graphic Storytelling in the Aftermath of the Holocaust” for The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, which she also co-edited, with Palgrave Macmillan in 2020.

In 2021, Aarons contributed “The Late Novellas” for Philip Roth in Context with Cambridge University Press and “The Burden of the Third Generation in Germany: Nora Krug’s Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home” in The Holocaust Across Borders: Trauma, Atrocity, and Representation in Literature and Culture with Lexington Books.

CARLOS X. ARDAVÍNTRABANCO / Modern Languages and Literatures published La Isla Subjetiva: Obra Dominicana in 2020 and Observaciones y Evocaciones de un Letraherido: Prosa Reunida in 2021, both with Ediciones Cielonaranja.

Ardavín-Trabanco co-edited Estados Unidos/España: diálogos filosóficos with the Instituto de Estudios Culturales Avanzados and Pasajero de la Literatura (1944-2000): Antonio Fernández Spencer with Ediciones Cielonaranja, both in 2020.

ALAN ASTRO / Modern Languages and Literatures published Autour Du Yiddish (Litterature, Histoire, Politique) (French Edition) with Classiques Garnier in 2021.

PETER BALBERT / English published “Solar Copulation and Spiral Rhythm: Norman Mailer, Giovanni Verga, Trigant Burrow, and the Courage of Desire in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Sun’” in The Mailer Review, Vol. 14.

C. MACKENZIE BROWN / Religion contributed “Karmic Versus Organic Evolution: The Hindu Encounter with Modern Evolutionary Science” for Asian Religious Responses to Darwinism: Evolutionary Theories in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and East Asian Cultural Contexts with Springer in 2020, a book for which he was also a co-editor.

bolded Trinity faculty, staff, students, or alumni *Trinity undergraduate researchers

JENNY BROWNE / English published “Until the Sea Closed Over Us and the Light Was Gone” in The American Poetry Review, 2021, Vol. 49, Issue 4.

NORMA E. CANTÚ / Modern Languages and Literatures copublished Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa: Pedagogy and Practice for Our Classrooms and Communities with the University of Arizona Press in 2020.

GREGORY CLINES / Religion contributed “Grief, Tranquility, and Śānta Rasa in Ravişeņa’s Padmapurāņa” for The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Emotions in Classical Indian Philosophy with Bloomsbury Academic in 2021.

DUANE COLTHARP / English published “Richard Gough, Peter Peckard, and the Problem of Little Gidding” in the Journal of Anglican Studies, 2020, Vol. 18, Issue 1.

ERWIN COOK / Classical Studies was invited to contribute an analysis of Book 6 of Homer’s Odyssey for the Oxford Critical Guide to the poem with Oxford University Press.

STEPHEN FIELD / Modern Languages and Literatures co-organized a roundtable, “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Qi,” and chaired a panel, “Uncovering Connections Hidden by Literary trinity.edu/impact-magazine IMPACT

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Works / ARTS AND HUMANITIES

Authorities from Late Imperial to Republican China,” at the Southwest Conference on Asian Studies in October 2020.

ROBERT FLYNN / English was listed in the International Who’s Who

by Routledge.

JASON JOHNSON / History gave the invited keynote for Texas A&M University San Antonio’s 8th Annual Holocaust Remembrance Day in April 2021.

ANDREW KANIA / Philosophy published “Ready Player One? A Response to Ricksand” in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2021, Vol. 79. Kania contributed “Space” for the Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy with Oxford University Press in 2021. Kania presented an introduction to the philosophy of music as part of the philosophy speaker series at Texas A&M University–Commerce in April 2021, and he participated in two panel discussions of new books in aesthetics: “Julian Dodd’s Being True to Works of Music” at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Meeting in January 2021; and “Anna Pakes’s Choreography Invisible” at the American Society for Aesthetics Eastern Division Meeting in 2021.

JOE KNEER / Music was appointed music director and conductor of Symphony Viva, a San Antonio-based orchestra that presents standard orchestral concerts as well as fully staged ballets in collaboration with the Alamo City Dance Company.

ANDREW B. KRAEBEL / English published “Latin Manuscripts of Richard Rolle at the University of Illinois” in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 2020, Vol. 119, Issue 4.

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KENNETH LOISELLE / History spent the spring semester on a Fulbright grant to conduct research in France, where he began developing a summer semester program with the Center for International Engagement. During this trip, Loiselle also worked on a monograph and participated in workshops for French graduate students who are working on the history of Freemasonry and sociocultural history writ large from the 17th to the 19th centuries.

SHAJ MATHEW / English published “Ekphrastic Temporality” in New Literary History, 2021, Vol. 52, Number 2. This essay was awarded the 2020 Ralph Cohen Prize.

ANA MARIA MUTIS / Modern Languages and Literatures co-edited Ecofictions, Ecorealities and Slow Violence in Latin America and the Latinx World with Routledge in 2020.

JUDITH NORMAN / Philosophy and Mel Webb / Philosophy received $10,000 from Humanities Texas, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, to fund their program, The Trinity University Philosophy and Literature Circle at the Torres Unit.

KATHRYN O’ROURKE / Art and Art History published “Houston Is Almost All Right: Postmodernism on the Texas Gulf Coast” in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 2020, Vol. 79, Issue 3.

CORINNE PACHE / Classical Studies contributed “Translating Friendship: My Brilliant Friend and the Aeneid” for Latin Poetry and its Reception with Routledge in 2021.

ANDREW PORTER / English published “Chili” in the Chicago Quarterly Review, 2020, Vol. 32, as

well as “The Empty Room” in New Letters and “Safe Room” in Boulevard.

Porter led the panel “To Make A Long Story Short: How to Design a Successful Course in Flash Fiction” at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference in March 2021.

DAVID RANDO / English chaired the panel “Backwards and Forwards: Fluidity and Form” and presented “Giacomo Joyce: Hope and Spatial Form” at the International James Joyce Symposium, hosted by the Università degli Studi di Trieste in June 2021.

KATHRYN V. SANTOS / English published “‘Let me be th’interpreter’: Shakespeare and the Tongues of War” in Shakespeare Studies, 2020, Vol. 48 and “‘Our Language is the Forest’: Landscapes of the Mother Tongue in David Greig’s Dunsinane” for Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, 2021, Vol. 13, Issue 2. Santos co-contributed “What Does the Wolf Say? Animal Language and Political Noise in Coriolanus” for The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Animals with Routledge in 2020. Santos gave three presentations: “Teaching Latinx Shakespeare in and Beyond the Classroom” for the Teaching and Learning Shakespeare Now Online Professional Development Institute in July 2020; “Language and Labor: Race in Translation” for Portugal, Race, and Memory: A Conversation, A Reckoning, hosted by The Ohio State University in March 2021; and “What Says She? Listening to Women’s Voices in Shakespeare” for a Folger Education professional development lecture in March 2021. Santos coorganized the roundtable “The Bard in the Borderlands: Race, Language, and Coloniality,” hosted by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in February 2021, and also organized a Public Humanities Seminar on the topic of “Shakespeare and Race.”

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Carey Latimore

Abra Schnur

Lauren Turek

GAME, SET, PAST

Faculty help students shine light on history of Trinity’s women student-athletes

by Brian Yancelson ’22

While many students may run away from school the second finals end, four Trinity University students used the summer of 2021 to dive headfirst into the University’s past.

Funded by the Mellon Initiative and carried out by Zoe Grout ’22, Samantha Henry ’22, Ardi Saunders ’22 and H Walker-Tamboli ’23 with the help of University archivist Abra Schnur and history professors Lauren Turek, Ph.D., and Carey Latimore, Ph.D., the Trinity University Women’s Intercollegiate Athletics (TUWIA) History Project aimed to highlight the experiences of women student-athletes at Trinity, especially in the decades after the landmark Title IX passed in 1972.

The students produced a directory of Trinity women’s sports teams, a timeline of women’s athletics at Trinity, and two digital exhibits that explore the inequities women athletes faced and how Title IX, along with playing in Division III, impacted women student-athletes at Trinity.

Schnur worked side by side with the four students on a daily basis while they examined archival material, scanned images and documents for online display, and created descriptive information about those items. Turek, whose background is in public history and museum studies, helped the students synthesize their historical research to create the digital exhibits. Turek says museum work such as the exhibits the students created are important far behind the confines of campus.

“Through museum work, through exhibits and online projects, you can attract and reach a really broad audience and give them some crucial information that helps them better understand the world around them,” Turek says.

Mellon funding was also utilized to transcribe and make accessible 25 oral history interviews conducted by Betsy Gerhardt Pasley ’77,

Professor Emeritus Doug Brackenridge, and Shirley Rushing Poteet, a former physical education instructor at Trinity. Latimore taught the students what types of questions should be asked during oral histories and how to bring out the student-athletes’ experiences.

“Title IX is such an important step in our nation’s history. Most of the women interviewed experienced the impact of Title IX firsthand in its early years of implementation. I wanted [the students] to think about the story of someone being there in the midst of such transformative change,” Latimore says.

The TUWIA History Project will soon be supplemented with a book written by Pasley and published by Trinity University Press in late 2022 which, along with the digital exhibition, will help the history of women’s athletics at Trinity live on forever.

Explore the TUWIA History Project at playingfield.coateslibrary.com.

Trinity women’s basketball team in Sams Center in 1975 Photo courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Coates Library

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Liz Ward and Jon Lee in Trinity’s papermaking studio.

“O1701” by Jon Lee

“Ghosts of the Old Mississippi: Dismal Swamp/Northern Lights” by Liz Ward

WOODCUTS AND WATERCOLOR

Two faculty artists have works acquired by San Antonio Museum of Art

by Jeanna Goodrich Balreira ’08

Trinity University art professors Jon Lee, MFA, and Elizabeth Ward, MFA, have each had works acquired by the San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA) as part of the museum’s initiative to acquire art by contemporary San Antonio artists. Lee and Ward are among eight local artists whose works mark first entries by the artists to SAMA’s collection; their pieces are now available to view in the museum.

“The group of artists,” including Lee and Ward, “represents an incredible range of conceptual and formal approaches and come from a multitude of backgrounds that have shaped their artistic practices,” says Lana S. Meador, SAMA’s assistant curator of modern and contemporary art. “Their work brings new dimension to SAMA’s collection and allows us to expand and deepen narratives about art across culture, medium, and style.”

Lee’s woodcut, “O1701,” explores the poetic subtleties of color and line, reinventing traditional printmaking processes and materials. Born in Seoul, Lee draws on his native Korea’s rich and long history of printmaking, and his practice focuses on a traditional Japanese woodcut technique called mokuhanga that he honed during residencies at the Mokuhanga Innovation Lab in Japan, where “O1701” was printed.

“In my almost two decades in San Antonio, I have come to know this city as unexpectedly humble despite 20

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its bursting diversity of culture. SAMA’s thoughtful collecting helps communities build a sense of identity, celebrating what makes this city unique and helping us build local pride,” Lee says. “While it is important for a museum to show work from across the world and across centuries, it is equally important to represent the people and communities who visit the museum.”

Ward combined watercolor, gesso, silverpoint, pastel, and collage on paper​to create “Ghosts of the Old Mississippi: Dismal Swamp/Northern Lights,” one in a series of 15 large-scale drawings based on maps of the ancient courses of the Mississippi River.

Reflecting on society’s relationship to the environment, Ward connects the river’s history with the formation of American identity, including the river’s settlement by various cultures, its usage for commerce including the slave trade, and containment by engineering.

“I’m truly honored that my work has been acquired for SAMA’s collection. In addition to the validation that becoming part of the permanent collection confers upon the work, the piece will now be accessible to the community and exist in conversation with other artworks from the past and present,” Ward says.

“Trinity faculty representation in SAMA’s collection raises the profile of the University and affirms the value of our faculty artists.”

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GARY SEIGHMAN / Music contributed “Going Nuclear: Split Your Choir to Unleash Its Power!” for The Choral Conductor’s Companion: 100 Rehearsal Techniques, Imaginative Ideas, Quotes, and Facts with GIA Publications in September 2020.

CHAD SPIGEL / Religion contributed “A Quantitative Analysis of HouseSynagogues in Ancient Palestine” for The Synagogue in Ancient Palestine: Current Issues and Emerging Trends with Tübingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht in 2020.

BENJAMIN ELDON STEVENS / Classical Studies published “‘Not the lover’s choice, but the poet’s’: Classical Receptions in Portrait of a Lady on Fire” in Frontière-s and Antiquipop in 2020. Stevens contributed “MiddleEarth as Underworld: from katabasis to eucatastrophe” for Tolkien and the Classical World with Walking Tree Publishers in 2021. Stevens gave three presentations: “Artifice/ial intelligence?

Epic ekphrasis & ancient theory of mind” at a conference on Greek Epic and AI, hosted by the University of Oslo in October 2020; “Interlingual Translation and Metaphysical Transgression in Film Horror” for a translation studies workshop, hosted by the Herzog August Bibliothek in October 2020; and “Immersivity & other fantasies of antiquity in games” for a conference on immersivity and ancient classics, hosted by the University of Bristol in March 2021.

Stevens was invited to present “Nihil sub sole novum? Some ancient histories of science fiction” at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s seminar series in March 2021.

Gina Tam receives media training during a Public Intellectual Fellows conference in Washington, D.C.

GINA TAM NAMED CHINESE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL FELLOW History professor selected as one of 20 prominent Chinese specialists in the country

by Sydney Rhodes ’23

Trinity University history professor Gina Tam, Ph.D., was recently named one of 20 Public Intellectual Fellows through the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, a program meant to mentor and highlight a handful of China specialists from across the country. The program intends to increase Americans’ understanding of China by strengthening links among U.S. academics, policymakers, opinion leaders, and the public.

Tam says she feels overwhelmed and honored to receive this fellowship and be included in important conversations between academics and policy makers, professionals, and the general public.

“I have long found it a responsibility to not just write for other academics, but to help make China legible for broader audiences, both my students and other communities,” Tam says. “It is also meaningful to me because, right now, U.S.-China relations are deteriorating, and a lot of us who study China are finding it difficult to maintain the very personal connections with China that make our work so meaningful. I can’t think of a more important time for us to be having difficult, but critical, discussions about what it means to sustain engagement with China in a compassionate, nuanced, and empathetic way today. We need to work together to find ways to speak for the most oppressed groups within China and also work to dispel the common two-dimensional, flat, or even racist tropes that often dominate popular discussions about China and feed anti-Asian racism around the world.”

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A CLASSROOM ON THE INSIDE Philosophy circle brings incarcerated scholars, Trinity class together

by Jeremy Gerlach

Trinity students and incarcerated scholars use written correspondence to exchange classwork through the The Philosophy and Literature Circle program.

Judith Norman

Mel Webb

What does it mean to be human?

This is a question college philosophy courses across the country have asked their students for centuries. But for one class of Trinity students, which pairs 15 Tigers with 15 incarcerated scholars, this question is generating some unexpected answers.

“The scholars and college students get to discover what it’s like to put their own ideas out there,” says program founder and philosophy faculty member Mel Webb, Ph.D. “These scholars are people who’ve been locked up in the carceral system and often don’t make it to college campuses. Our college campus learning communities are at a deficit as a result of this.”

Started by Webb in January 2019 through the University of Texas at San Antonio, the Philosophy and Literature Circle connects college students with incarcerated scholars in a 12-week program. Trinity students and these scholars are classmates, exchanging poetry, written reviews of each other’s papers, and discussions over material from authors such as Langston Hughes, Louise Erdrich, Plato, and Martin Luther King Jr. “The humanities grapples with questions about what it means to be human,” says philosophy professor Judith Norman, Ph.D., who has worked with Webb to launch this program at Trinity, linking it to the course GNED 3430, “Moral Imagination and US Incarceration.” “We’re having discussions with people that have to confront that question every day—by fighting for their humanity.”

“The humanities grapples with questions about what it means to be human. We’re having discussions with people that have to confront that question every day—by fighting for their humanity.”

The class’ format is typical of many Trinity courses. Conducted collaboratively, the class begins each day with Trinity students voicing their opinions on the weekly reading. The group centers discussion not just on abstract interpretations of the reading, but how the material relates to them on a personal level.

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For student Rebecca Cruz ’21, a neuroscience major from the Rio Grande Valley, the course is changing some of her preconceptions about both incarcerated people and philosophy. “Learning with these scholars, you see how the material is personal to them,” Cruz says. “It opens up our discussions in a whole new way.”

Webb and Norman say they continue to be surprised at the unexpected ways that philosophy keeps connecting people in—and out—of the class, such as the dynamic between corrections officers and the scholars.

“The officers came to think of these individuals as pursuing scholarly goals,” Norman adds, “and their relationship shifted for the better.”

So, for a course that raises tough questions, Norman says it’s just as important who gets to do the asking. “Knowledge is best served by extending our community and involving those with different perspectives. This does turn upside down a lot of the image of philosophy, very much for the better.”

This program is made possible in part by a grant from Humanities Texas, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional support comes from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.

CLAUDIA STOKES / English was awarded a short-term research fellowship from the New York Public Library. Stokes was commissioned to edit two volumes of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s religious writings for the Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe with Oxford University Press.

HEATHER I. SULLIVAN / Modern Languages and Literatures was invited to contribute four essays: “The Dark Pastoral: Material Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene” in Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities, 2020, Vol. 1, Issue 2; “Deadly Gardens: The ‘Gothic Green’ in Goethe and Eichendorff ” for EcoGothic Gardens in Long Nineteenth Century: Phantoms, Fantasy and Uncanny Flowers with Manchester University Press in 2020; “Vegetal Scale in the Anthropocene: The Dark Green” in Ecozon@, 2020, Vol. 11, Issue 2; and “Goethe’s ‘Leaf ’ and Scales of the Anthropocene: The Vegetal versus the Geological” in The Philosophical Life of Plants in 2021. Sullivan was invited to give two lectures: “Dark Green: Fire,” given for the lecture series at the Centre for Culture and Ecology at Durham University in March 2021, and “The Dark Green: Plants, Romanticism and the Early Anthropocene,” given for the Ringvorlesung sponsored by the University of Frankfurt, Mainz, and Darmstadt, Germany for the lecture series on “Romantische Ökologien” (Romantic Ecologies) in May 2021. Sullivan was invited to become associate editor of European ecocriticism journal Ecozon@ in November 2020 and currently serves as vice president of the Goethe Society of North America.

ANGELA TARANGO / Religion received a $40,000 Sabbatical Grant for Researchers from the Louisville Institute in Spring 2021 for her tentatively titled project, “Los Hijos de Juan y Carlos Wesley: Tejano Methodism, Material Culture and the Creation of a Tejano Methodist Identity at San Antonio’s La Trinidad United Methodist Church.”

BETSY TONTIPLAPHOL / English contributed “This Living Hand: Bright Star and the Etsy Effect” for Keats and Popular Culture with the Romantic Circles Praxis Series and “On Keats’s Last Letter” for ‘Remember me to all friends’: A Collective Valediction for Keats with the Keats Letters Project, both in 2020. Tontiplaphol was named a finalist for the NASSR/Romantic Circles Pedagogy Prize for “Keats and the Community: An Outreach Project” in January 2021.

LAUREN TUREK / History was invited to write “Rethinking How the United States Projects its Values” for the Rethinking U.S. Policy on International Religious Freedom Berkley Forum at the Georgetown University Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs in Washington, D.C., in January 2021.

Turek appeared on a number of podcasts, including The UpWords Podcast, Professor Buzzkill, The F Word Podcast, Religion in the American Experience, Horns of a Dilemma, and podcasts from Public Radio International and New Books Network to discuss her book, To Bring the Good News to All Nations: Evangelical Influence in Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Relations.

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Complex Discovery Trinity biology professor describes new species of Amazonian primate

by Jeanna Goodrich Balreira ’08

Tomas Hrbek has a knack for

You can see it in his eyes—complex optical organs firing energetic lightning bolts of excitement as he explains concepts of biodiversity.

You can hear it in his voice—complex blends of Czech and Portuguese accents honed during the height of intensive research, where ‘pele’ and ‘formiga’ sneak into euphonious English explanations.

And you can read it in his research—complex explorations of diverse ecosystems and dense datasets from deep within the Amazon Rainforest.

Mico scheideri. Photo courtesy Rodrigo Araujo-Costa.

Luckily for Mico schneideri, complexity is in Tomas Hrbek’s DNA. In fact, it is complexity that allowed this new species of Amazonian primate to emerge from years of fieldwork and surveys. Mico schneideri, or Schneider’s marmoset, had been misidentified as an entirely different species for nearly three decades because of the scarcity of basic ecological and distributional data.

To understand this misidentification—and the complexity it took to describe Mico schneideri correctly—we travel nearly 5,000 miles from San Antonio to the forests of the ​​Juruena-Teles Pires mineral province in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil.

At the confluence of the Juruena and Teles Pires Rivers, this province lies directly within the “arc of deforestation,” the southern edge of the Amazon Rainforest rapidly being cleared for cattle ranching, small-scale subsistence farming, and logging. It’s here that Hrbek, Rodrigo Costa-Araújo, Ph.D., from the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi and the Federal University of Amazonas, and their team began a series of nearly a dozen trips deep into the rainforest’s canopies, cataloging visual and aural observations of what would soon be known as Schneider’s marmoset.

The goal? To “obtain new distribution records, specimens, and samples to overcome the previous scarcity of these materials and data in museums and in literature,” Hrbek and his team wrote in a 2021 article for Nature’s Scientific Reports. This fieldwork, called surveying, consisted of forest treks and upstream canoeing to approximate, catalog, and geolocate call-and-response observations.

“We were not specifically looking for a new marmoset,” Hrbek admits. Rather, the team was looking

to record an abundance of general data about Amazonian marmosets of the genus Mico, marmosets that are “little known endemics of this region and therefore a priority for research and conservation efforts.”

But with time in the field spent watching common behaviors, using and understanding vocalization techniques, and analyzing museum skins in collections, the team began to hone in on the fact that they weren’t observing Mico emiliae, or Snethlage’s marmoset, as Schneider’s marmoset had previously been classified. “It then became clear that in this particular area, there was something that didn’t match essentially anything else that had been seen before,” Hrbek says.

Hrbek knew that the team could not solely rely on observational data to confirm its hunch. They turned to a set of surveys conducted over the course of the past century. Data from these surveys are spread out in institutions and museums across the world, from Brazil to Europe. This data helped inform an overview of both the taxonomic revisions and phylogenetic revisions of Mico. Through laboratory analysis of these revisions, the research team members confirmed their survey data, and Schneider’s marmoset emerged as a new species.

“We were not specifically looking for a new marmoset... [but] it became clear that in this particular area, there was something that didn’t match essentially anything else that had been seen before.”

“The real biodiversity of the Amazon basin is significantly underestimated,” Hrbek says.

Biodiversity is driven in part, he explains, by the dynamism of the geology of the Amazon basin.

Geological disruptors have the potential to fragment species populations that were previously continuous, allowing them to diverge; they also have the potential trinity.edu/impact-magazine IMPACT

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above Hrbek works with Trinity Coatney ’23 and Elizabeth Proctor ’22 in his lab. below Data collection allows analysis and statistics to inform research on the Araguaia dolphin. Inia araguaiaensis photo courtesy Gabriel Santos-Melo.

to bring previously separated populations into contact with one another. As these species interact with one another, they have the potential to form hybrid groups carrying genes from two different sets of parental species. Over time, this hybrid group may become separated or isolated from its parent species due to the emergence of a behavioral or physical barrier. If the hybrid group survives this divergence and its population becomes stable, it may eventually be described as a new species. “Although this mechanism is underappreciated, it’s important for generating diversity in addition to the traditional mechanisms,” he adds.

has dedicated his career to exploring our world’s biodiversity and championing conservation efforts.

“There are 146 primate species and subspecies in Amazonia, representing 20% of the global primate diversity and comprising the most diverse primate fauna in the world,” Hrbek and his team wrote in the 2021 article. “Characterizing primate species diversity and distribution in the Amazonian arc of deforestation is a necessary first step ... which lends support to biodiversity conservation in this region before the entire biome reaches an environmental point of no return.”

Hrbek reframes this: “If we don’t know the species exists, how do we know we should protect it?”

“If we don’t know the species exists, how do we know we should protect it?”

All in a day’s work? Hrbek, the Cowles Distinguished Professor of Biology at Trinity University, is no stranger to new species. An ecologist and geneticist, Hrbek has more than two dozen new species discoveries to his name, ranging from a Brazilian river dolphin to a black uakari in Venezuela to a pupfish in Turkey. Hrbek 26

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Of course, a question like this begets complexity in its answer. Often, ecologists don’t know—can’t know—that a species exists because concrete, empirical data hasn’t yet been collected (hence Hrbek’s team’s surveys in the ​​JuruenaTeles Pires province). But for Hrbek, it’s about more than the raw data: It’s about the assumption

“To become comfortable with complexity, to be able to function within it, means you can approach science with lenses of analysis, statistics, and predictions—from datadriven perspectives.”

that we, as humans and scientists, know so little about the world’s true biodiversity.

“Conservation efforts are identified and conservation areas are designated based on known species in that ecological region. Decisions are made about adding or removing a particular area from a conservation effort when we think, or don’t think, a species exists somewhere else,” he says. “There are entire ecological communities composed of these ‘cryptic species,’ and if we don’t know they exist or concern ourselves with their conservation, we could wipe them out entirely.”

Hrbek’s research agenda is to see to it that this doesn’t happen—at least not more than it already has. As the arc of deforestation encroaches ever closer into the heart of the Amazon Rainforest, Hrbek has extended his focus to educating students and communities about the importance of conservation efforts and the effects on the lack thereof. He is a professor in the Trinity First-Year Experience course “Climate: Changed,” where he encourages students to inquisitively explore and critically interpret the data fueling climate change arguments in order to draw their own evidencebased conclusions, rather than simply accepting existing conclusions at face value.

“As humans, we have a tendency to seek simple solutions. But there are no simple solutions for anything. Complexity is underappreciated; to become comfortable with complexity, to be able to function within it, means you can approach science with lenses of analysis, statistics, and predictions—from data-driven perspectives.”

If complexity makes good science, it makes Tomas Hrbek a good scientist. And it means the future of complex biodiversity is in good hands.

Hrbek uses data-driven approaches in his lab to analyze complexity in biodiversity.

Hrbek’s article, “An integrative analysis uncovers a new, pseudo-cryptic species of Amazonian marmoset (Primates: Callitrichidae: Mico) from the arc of deforestation,” was published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, Volume 11, in August 2021. To read the open access article online, visit nature.com/articles/s41598-021-93943-w. trinity.edu/impact-magazine IMPACT

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Chemistry professor Ryan Davis, Ph.D., and a team of undergraduates published “Ion-Molecule Interactions Enable Unexpected Phase Transitions in Organic-Inorganic Aerosol” in Science Advances, 2020, Vol. 6, Issue 47. This research helped inform the team’s startup, MicroLev, which won Trinity’s 2021 Louis H. Stumberg Venture Competition.

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SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, and MATHEMATICS Nationally recognized for academic strength, interdisciplinary focus, and undergraduate research, Trinity’s STEM programs offer students cutting edge opportunities that include experiential learning at the interface of disciplines. The University’s STEM departments include Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Engineering Science, Geosciences, Mathematics, Physics and Astronomy, and Psychology.

EDUARDO C. BALREIRA / Mathematics co-published “Resources for Supporting Mathematics and Data Science Instructors During COVID-19” for Letters in Biomathematics, 2021, Vol. 8, Issue 1.

CAROLYN BECKER / Psychology co-published six articles: “Body image in older women: a mediator of BMI and wellness behaviors” in the Journal of Women and Aging, 2021, Vol. 33, Issue 3; “Sexual Trauma Uniquely Associated with Eating Disorders: A Replication Study,” authored alongside F. Gomez ’18 and colleagues in Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 2021, Vol. 13, Issue 2; “Adapting the Body Project to a Non-Western Culture: A Dissonance-Based Eating Disorders Prevention Program for Saudi Women” in Eating and Weight Disorders, in 2021; “Psychometric Properties of the Contextual Body Image Questionnaire for Athletes: A Replication and Extension Study in Female Collegiate Athletes,” authored alongside L.S. Kilpela ’04 and colleagues in the Journal of Eating Disorders, 2021, Vol. 9, Issue 1; and “Dissemination of a Dissonance-Based Body Image Promotion Program in Church Settings: A Preliminary Controlled Pilot Study with Adult Women” and “Tailoring a Dissonance-Based Body Image Intervention for Adult Women in a Proof of Concept Trial: The Women’s Body Initiative,” the latter of which was co-written by

C.L. Verzijl ’14, S. Wilfred ’14, Kilpela, and a colleague; both articles were for Body Image, 2021, Vol. 36. Becker gave the invited keynote “Confronting the eating disorder stereotype: Food insecurity” at the 9th Annual Veritas Collaborative Annual Symposium on Eating Disorders in September 2020.

BIOCHEMISTRY AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY, led by Corina Maeder / Chemistry and Frank Healy / Biology , was awarded full accreditation by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in December 2020.

BERT CHANDLER / Chemistry, Akbar Mahdavi-Shakib / Chemistry, K. B. Sravan Kumar / Chemistry, T. Whittaker ’17, and colleagues published “Kinetics of H2 Adsorption at the Metal–Support Interface of Au/ TiO2 Catalysts Probed by Broad Background IR Absorbance” in Angewandte Chemie - International Edition, 2021, Vol. 60, Issue 14. Chandler, Mahdavi-Shakib, Whittaker, and colleagues published “Combining Benzyl Alcohol Oxidation Saturation Kinetics and Hammett Studies as Mechanistic Tools for Examining Supported Metal Catalysts” in ACS Catalysis, 2020, Vol. 10, Issue 17.

KELVIN CHENG / Physics and Astronomy was awarded a three-year grant of $240,000 from the Robert A. Welch Foundation for “Understanding

bolded Trinity faculty, staff, students, or alumni *Trinity undergraduate researchers

Molecular Mechanisms of Amyloid Diseases from Multiscale Simulations of Early Aggregation of Disordered Protein on Lipid Nanodomains.”

CHRISTINA B. COOLEY / Chemistry co-published “Pharmacologic IRE1/XBP1s activation confers targeted ER proteostasis reprogramming” in Nature Chemical Biology, 2020, Vol. 16, Issue 10. Cooley received a five-year grant of $403,322 from the National Science Foundation for “CAREER: Fluorogenic Radical Polymerization for Signal Amplification and Detection.”

RYAN DAVIS / Chemistry, D. Richards ’20, K. Trobaugh ’20, J. Hajek-Herrera*, and colleagues published “Ion-Molecule Interactions Enable Unexpected Phase Transitions in Organic-Inorganic Aerosol” in Science Advances, 2020, Vol. 6, Issue 47.

SABER N. ELAYDI / Mathematics co-published Progress on Difference Equations and Discrete Dynamical Systems: 25th ICDEA, London, UK, June 24–28, 2019 with Springer in 2021.

Elaydi co-published “A continuous-time mathematical model and discrete approximations for the aggregation of β-Amyloid” in the Journal of Biological Dynamics, 2021, Vol. 15, Issue 1.

WILLIAM D. ELLISON / Psychology published “Psychotherapy for Borderline Personality Disorder: Does the Type of Treatment Make trinity.edu/impact-magazine IMPACT

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A slice of a 3D projection of fluorescent images of human neural stem cells in an engineered tissue.

Engineering science major Anna Gonzalez ’23 studies a biological sample in Dany Munoz Pinto’s lab.

BRAIN BUILDING

Trinity laboratory combines disciplines to take crucial step forward for Alzheimer’s research

by Jeremy Gerlach

Building central nervous system tissue from scratch is difficult.

But it’s also a crucial step towards understanding key elements in the onset and progression of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), which affects the central nervous system. “Loss of cellular connections, inflammation, cell death, and tissue degradation characterize AD progression. Eventually, the brain shrinks,” says engineering science professor Dany Munoz-Pinto, Ph.D., “Eventually the brain will become not functional and, sadly, the patients die.”

Naturally, it’s hard for patients with AD to donate brain tissue, which slows down any research into a successful treatment. So, this year, Munoz-Pinto and his team of student researchers have attempted to build their own artificial tissues. “We are combining a bit of material science, chemistry, biology, and stem cells to develop models of brain tissue,” he says. “In the long term, we want to evaluate if these proposed biomaterials can sustain the testing of new chemical compounds, an in-vitro platform, that we can use to do testing without having to use human or animal models.”

This type of multifaceted work takes a multi-talented team of students. So, Munoz-Pinto focused on building an interdisciplinary lab: Carson Koch ’22, a neuroscience major on the pre-med track; Anna Gonzalez ’23, an engineering science major; and Meagan McKee ’24, an undeclared (but aspiring) engineering science major.

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McKee says the experience of being in-person in Munoz-Pinto’s lab is an incredibly supportive one. “Dr. Dany just gives us so much advice throughout the day,” she says. “We joke about how many turns a conversation with him will take. He is definitely given us all the sales pitch on going to grad school, as well as so much general advice beyond ‘Do not touch that, you will contaminate your sample!’”

Munoz-Pinto points to the building itself that houses his laboratory, the Center for the Sciences and Innovation, as being “designed in a way to help all subjects collide. My office is close to my good friends in chemistry, biology and neuroscience. I have students in the chemistry department and the neuroscience program who can contribute to engineering. It is always good to have a chemist, a biologist, or a neuroscience major look at the problems faced by an engineering student, and vice versa.

“Our students have to have that multidisciplinary background if they are going to work as an entire team. And that is very important for me—I am always learning from the students. Every project we work on together is a new discovery,” Munoz Pinto says. “Research is something that is not under your control, but is something that will challenge you, and make you a continuous learner.”

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a Difference?” in Current Treatment Options in Psychiatry, 2020, Vol. 7, Issue 3, and Ellison co-published “The Availability of Training Opportunities in Personality Disorders in APA- and PCSAS- Accredited Clinical and Counseling Psychology Doctoral Programs” in Training and Education in Professional Psychology, 2021. Ellison, A. Trahan ’20, J. Pinzon ’19, M. Gillespie ’19, L. Simmons ’19, and K. King ’19 published “For Whom, and for What, is Experience Sampling More Accurate Than Retrospective Report?” in Personality and Individual Differences, 2020, Vol. 163.

PAULA T. HERTEL / Psychology published “Everyday Challenges to the Practice of Desirable Difficulties: Introduction to the Forum” in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 2020, Vol. 9, Issue 4. Hertel co-published “Inferences Training Affects Memory, Rumination, and Mood” in Clinical Psychological Science in 2021.

TOMAS HRBEK / Biology co-contributed “Genetic Diversity of New World Crocodilians,” “Biogeography and Comparative Phylogeography of New-World Crocodylians,” and “Molecular Phylogenetics of the New-World Crocodylia” for Conservation Genetics of New World Crocodilians with Springer in 2020.

MICHELE A. JOHNSON / Biology co-published “Use it and bruise it: copulation rates are associated with muscle inflammation across anole lizard species” in the Journal of Zoology, 2021, Vol. 314, Issue 3 and, along with Jeremy W. Donald / Library and colleagues, published “Life History and Environment Predict Variation in Testosterone Across Vertebrates” in Evolution, 2021, Vol. 75, Issue 5.

Johnson gave the invited symposium “Physical Mechanisms of Behaviors” at the meeting of Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology in 2021, and she was invited to present seminars

at Texas A&M San Antonio, Claremont-McKenna College, St. Edward’s University, and St. Mary’s University.

EDDY KWESSI / Mathematics published “On the equivalence between weak BMO and the space of derivatives of the Zygmund class” in Demonstratio Mathematica, 2021, Vol. 54, Issue 1; “A Consistent Estimator of Nontrivial Stationary Solutions of Dynamic Neural Fields” in Stats, 2021, Vol. 4, Issue 1; and “Double Penalized Semi-Parametric Signed-Rank Regression with Adaptive LASSO” in the Journal of Systems Science and Complexity, 2021, Vol. 34, Issue 1. Kwessi co-published “The Special Atom Space and Haar Wavelets in Higher Dimensions” in Demonstratio Mathematica, 2020, Vol. 53, Issue 1 and “A Nearly Exact Discretization Scheme for the FitzHugh–Nagumo Model” in Differential Equations and Dynamical Systems in 2021.

DANIEL J. LEHRMANN / Geosciences, D. Droxler ’15, C. Kelleher ’17, A. Lehrmann ’19, A. Lhemann ’18, G. Mabry ’15, L. Mercado ’15, L. Yazbek ’17, and colleagues published “Controls on Microbial and Oolitic Carbonate Sedimentation and Stratigraphic Cyclicity Within a Mixed Carbonate-Siliciclastic System: Upper Cambrian Wilberns Formation, Llano Uplift, Mason County, Texas, USA” in Depositional Record, 2020, Vol. 6, Issue 2. Additionally, Lehrmann co-published eight articles: “Interactions Between Sediment Production and Transport in the Geometry of Carbonate Platforms: Insights from Forward Modeling of the Great Bank of Guizhou (Early to Middle Triassic), South China” in Marine and Petroleum Geology, 2020, Vol. 118; “Fully automated carbonate petrography using deep convolutional neural networks” in Marine and Petroleum Geology, 2020, Vol. 122; “Implications for controls on Upper Cambrian microbial build-ups across multiple-scales, Mason County, Central Texas, USA” in Marine

and Petroleum Geology, 2020, Vol. 121; “Proliferation of Chondrodonta as a Proxy of Environmental Instability at the Onset of OAE1a: Insights from Shallow-Water Limestones of the Apulia Carbonate Platform” in Sedimentology, 2021, Vol. 86, Issue 7; “Triassic Foraminifera from the Great Bank of Guizhou, Nanpanjiang Basin, south China: taxonomic account, biostratigraphy, and implications for recovery from end-Permian mass extinction” in the Journal of Paleontology in 2021; “Sedimentology and geochemistry of a Lower Cretaceous dinosaur track site at the Mayan Ranch, Bandera, Texas: Implications for environments and preservation of a sauropod manus dominant trackway” in the South Texas Geological Society Bulletin, 2021, Vol. 61, Issue 6; and “Controls on Carbonate Platform Architecture and Reef Recovery Across the Palaeozoic to Mesozoic Transition: A High-Resolution Analysis of the Great Bank of Guizhou” and “Giant Sector-Collapse Structures (Scalloped Margins) of the Yangtze Platform and Great Bank of Guizhou, China: Implications for Genesis of Collapsed Carbonate Platform Margin Systems,” both for Sedimentology, 2020, Vol. 67, Issue 6. Lehrmann received $139,352 as part of a larger grant from the National Science Foundation’s Collaborative Research RUI for “Testing mechanisms for regional dolomitization of Triassic carbonate platforms across the Nanpanjiang Basin of south China.” He received more than $21,745 as part of a collaborative grant from RAPID/Collaborative Research for “Digitizing Early Cretaceous dinosaur trackways to preserve the geological heritage of central Texas.”

K. C. LEONG / Psychology, D. Patel*, Z. Young*, and M. Sundar* published “Oxytocin and addiction: Potential glutamatergic mechanisms” in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 2021, Vol. 22, Issue 5.

Leong, Patel, Sundar, and E. Lorenz* published “Oxytocin Attenuates trinity.edu/impact-magazine IMPACT

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Expression, but Not Acquisition, of Sucrose Conditioned Place Preference in Rats” in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience in 2020.

KEEP YOUR ION THE PRIZE

Biochemistry and molecular biology program receives full accreditation from ASBMB

by Jeanna Goodrich Balreira ’08

In spring 2021, Trinity’s biochemistry and molecular biology (BCMB) program was awarded a full, seven-year accreditation by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB). Truly interdisciplinary in nature, the degree program is co-chaired by chemistry professor Corina Maeder ’99, Ph.D., and biology professor Frank Healy, Ph.D. “BCMB sits between chemistry and biology, and because of this, students really get to choose a major that fits their interests,” Maeder says. She lauds the departments’ “amazing resources, excellent curriculum, and great faculty, all who care deeply about student success.”

An ASBMB accreditation recognizes excellence in BCMB degree programs and provides tools and resources for evaluating and strengthening academic offerings. For students, this means Trinity’s BCMB curriculum will align with current, transformative concepts and critical reasoning skills needed in today’s BCMB careers; for faculty and academic support staff, it provides resources and funding for recruitment, curricular development, and assessment.

The accreditation also signals to employers and graduate schools a level of confidence in the institution’s curriculum, instrumentation, faculty expertise, and commitment to developing communication skills on diverse teams.

Notably, the accreditation board cited the University’s BCMB program for the quality and availability of advanced instrumentation integrated into the curriculum as well as the true interdisciplinary nature of the program. Trinity joins approximately 100 other schools that have received ASBMB accreditation, ranging from research institutions to primarily undergraduate institutions.

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KELLY G. LYONS / Biology, M. Lenihan ’19, O. Roybal*, K. Carroll*, K. Reynoso*, and colleagues published “Culturable root endophyte communities are shaped by both warming and plant host identity in the Rocky Mountains, USA” in Fungal Ecology, 2021, Vol. 49.

CORINA MAEDER ’99 / Chemistry co-published “Activation of Prp28 ATPase by phosphorylated Npl3 at a critical step of spliceosome remodeling” in Nature Communications, 2021, Vol. 12, No. 3082. Maeder received a three-year grant of $450,000 from the Max and Minnie Tomerlin Voelcker Fund to research how mutations in two specific genes contribute to the eye disorder retinitis pigmentosa, and Maeder received $27,500 from the Flora Cameron Foundation for Women in Science: High School Girls STEM Partnership with Trinity University. Maeder serves as an American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology regional director for student chapters.

KEVIN MCINTYRE / Psychology co-edited Interpersonal Relationships and the Self-Concept with Springer in 2020 and co-authored the contributions “Relationship Dissolution and Self-Concept Change” and “Self-Concept Change at Work: Characteristics and Consequences of Workplace Self-Expansion” for the book.

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Ryan Davis and Josefina Hajek-Herrera ’22 analyze tools in Davis’s chemistry lab.

The MicroLev team works to refine their prototype, performing usability tweaks and analyzing results.

HEART OF THE MATTER

Trinity startup MicroLev wants to make studying aerosols affordable

by Jeremy Gerlach

Aerosols, or particles suspended in the air by gas, are all around us.

They include harmful pollution such as smog and smoke. For more than a year, they’ve also been at the forefront of the COVID-19 discussion, as tiny, virus-laden particles from sneezes and coughs are flung into the air around infected persons, putting those within 6 feet at risk.

Needless to say, studying aerosols is a vital process for scientists, but also a costly one. Aerosol research devices that can detect and categorize these particles cost in the hundreds of thousands. So, Trinity University startup MicroLev is aiming to build a more affordable one.

“Aerosols impact every aspect of our lives, and we don’t even realize it,” says chemistry professor Ryan Davis, Ph.D., who founded MicroLev along with students Josefina Hajek-Herrera ’22 and Bene Snyder ’22. “They’re literally everywhere—we’re exhaling them as we speak. Our industry is missing a cost-effective tool to characterize aerosols on a single particle basis.”

The MicroLev instrument fills that gap, allowing researchers to capture a single particle, levitate it, and categorize it. It operates on standard electrostatic principles: using an electric charge to suspend particulate matter.

And it’s a tool Davis, Hajek-Herrera, and Snyder hope to bring to classrooms and labs across the country, after winning Trinity’s Stumberg New Venture Competition.

MicroLev took home $25,000 in grand prize money this fall after advancing through the competition’s spring semifinals, where it also earned $5,000 in seed money and a spot in the Summer Accelerator program.

At Trinity, Davis’ research focuses on the chemistry and physics of aerosol particles and micro-droplets to address global issues in environmental and public health. But MicroLev is also an interdisciplinary group, with Hajek-Herrera, a business administration major in Trinity’s Neidorff School of Business, and Snyder, a business analytics and technology major who specializes in data science.

“This is an opportunity you don’t get at most universities. I couldn’t have asked for a better professor to work with.”

“It’s been unbelievable,” Davis says of MicroLev’s trajectory. “Over the course of the past year, Josefina and Bene have been such drivers of what MicroLev has become. I’ve been in awe, honestly, of their unique skill sets.”

The latest assembled version of the device is already “working great,” according to Davis, and the group plans to use the $25,000 in prize money to file for a crucial utility patent.

To Hajek-Herrera and Snyder, MicroLev represents something beyond accessible faculty mentorship: a true partnership between faculty and students.

“This is an opportunity you don’t get at most universities,” Hajek-Herrera says. “I couldn’t have asked for a better professor to work with.” trinity.edu/impact-magazine IMPACT

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Bethany Strunk examines samples with an undergraduate researcher in the Strunk Lab.

TRINITY RESEARCHERS UNCOVER SECRETS OF CMT DISEASE

Biology professor Bethany Strunk wins prestigious grant to continue research

by Jeremy Gerlach

For almost 3 million people worldwide, Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT) disease wreaks havoc on the nervous system that controls their muscles.

With no known cures and limited treatment options, this hereditary (inherited from parents) disorder has perplexed scientists and doctors for decades. But Trinity University biology professor Bethany Strunk, now armed with a prestigious national grant, is following a new lead that could provide insight into some forms of CMT. “We are really excited about this project,” says Strunk, the recipient of the 2021 Voelcker Fund Young Investigator Award, a three-year, $450,000 grant from the Max and Minnie Tomerlin Voelcker Fund for a project that began with an observation made during her postdoc in Lois Weisman’s lab at the University of Michigan. “Trinity has been the perfect fit for developing this research.”

In a rare and severe form of CMT known as Type 4J (CMT4J), the gene code for the lipid phosphatase Fig4 is mutated. CMT4J victims suffer debilitating neuromuscular symptoms as their myelin, the protective sheath around many nerve fibers, fails to rebuild and replace normally.

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failure to properly ‘switch’ between metabolic pathways they need to repair their myelin,” Strunk says.

“What we’re trying to do right now is determine how Fig4 interacts with pathways that weren’t on our radar before.”

“I chose a primarily undergraduate institution because my energy comes from working with students.”

While one might expect this type of research to come out of a larger institution, Strunk says a smaller, liberal arts university such as Trinity has a key advantage. “I chose a primarily undergraduate institution because my energy comes from working with students.

We are having fun doing something that is impactful at the same time,” Strunk says.

At Trinity, Strunk says she can trust her students with a high level of autonomy. “The undergraduates here are operating like graduate students.”

Already in the thick of things, Strunk and her students are currently working with yeast to test and

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explore their theory. From their lab in the Center for the Sciences and Innovation, the group is doing a lot of cloning—making DNA constructs they can use to express different mutants in yeast—and genetic engineering by altering yeast genomes to make “tools” they can use to observe various genetic changes.

These tools are instrumental in seeing how yeast grows under conditions where Fig4 is required, or other disease mutants confer a growth advantage.

Yet for all the advanced instrumentation and equipment Trinity offers, Strunk maintains that the key factors in her group’s success are the people.

“The quality of the students here, they’re not just doing what I’m asking them to do, but some of them are taking projects in their own directions,” Strunk says. “They’re making their own choices and asking the questions they want to ask.”

Some students, Strunk continues, are even working on identifying other conditions that give these mutants a growth advantage. That could lead to even more profound discoveries about the nature of CMT in the future.

They’re also poring over existing research literature, a pivotal part of the job. This will also give Strunk’s students the chance to become better students and researchers.

“I love that this becomes a teaching opportunity—an opportunity for them to find enrichment on the way to what they’re doing next. At Trinity, teaching is a huge part of my job, but we aren’t sacrificing anything from our research,” she says.

“And in that environment, the risk is low, but the potential outcome is as high as it’s going to get anywhere else.”

Strunk says she can’t wait to make new discoveries about CMT with her students. “My students get so excited that they’re contributing so much to this work,” she says. “I’ve been so impressed with how enthusiastic, capable, and fun these students are to work with.”

DANY J. MUNOZ-PINTO / Engineering Science, T. Cagle ’19, R. Van Drunen ’18, and Andrea C. Jimenez-Vergara / Engineering Science published “Modeling the effects of hyaluronic acid degradation on the regulation of human astrocyte phenotype using multicomponent interpenetrating polymer networks (mIPNs)” in Scientific Reports, 2020, Vol. 10. Munoz-Pinto and Jimenez-Vergara, Cagle, and A. Jolliffe ’21 published the conference proceeding “Modeling and Evaluating the Effects of Hyaluronic Acid Degradation on Human Microglia Activation Using Multi-Interpenetrating Polymer Networks (mIPNs) as 3D in Vitro Models” for the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in 2020. These four contributors along with M. Contestabili ’21 also published the conference proceeding “Multi-Interpenetrating Polymer Networks (mIPNs) As 3D in Vitro Models to Evaluate the Effects of Hyaluronic Acid Degradation on Human Microglia Activation” for the American Institute of Chemical Engineers Annual Meeting in 2020.

TROY MURPHY / Biology, L. Johnson ’21, N. Salazar ’19, C. Dreghorn ’19, and colleagues published “The Influence of Social-Grouping on Territorial Defense Behavior in the Black-Crested Titmouse (Baeolophus atricristatus)” in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 2020, Vol. 74, Issue 11. Murphy was elected as Fellow of the American Ornithological Society in recognition of his contributions to the field and his service to the society.

HOA NGUYEN / Mathematics and colleagues were awarded $1,016,977 from the joint DMS/NIGMS Initiative to Support Research at the Interface of the Biological and Mathematical Sciences. In this work, laboratory experiments, mathematical models, and computer simulations are used to study the hydrodynamic mechanisms that determine the performance differences between unicellular and multicellular choanoflagellates.

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KIMBERLEY A. PHILLIPS / Psychology and E. Bartling-John ’21 published “The Effect of Body Region on Hair Cortisol Concentration in Common Marmosets (Callithrix jacchus)” in Comparative Medicine, 2021, Vol. 71, Issue 2. Phillips co-published “Invariant synapse density and neuronal connectivity scaling in primate neocortical evolution” in Cerebral Cortex, 2020, Vol. 30, Issue 10 and “Sex Differences in the Brains of Capuchin Monkeys (Sapajus [Cebus] apella)” in the Journal of Comparative Neurology, 2021, Vol. 529, Issue 2.

JASON SHEARER / Chemistry co-published “Dinitrogen Insertion and Cleavage by a Metal–Metal Bonded Tricobalt(I) Cluster” in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2021, Vol. 143, Issue 15 and “Structure and Unprecedented Reactivity of a Mononuclear Nonheme Cobalt(III) Iodosylbenzene Complex” in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 2020, Vol. 59, Issue 32. Shearer received a $394,366 National Institutes of Health Research Enhancement Award to study “Metallopeptide Based Mimics of Mononuclear Nonheme Iron Enzymes: Understanding Enzymatic Reactivity Using Designed Metallopeptides.”

JENNIFER STEELE / Physics and Astronomy received a three-year grant of $257,090 from the National Science Foundation to support equipment purchases, travel, presentations, and funding for eight undergraduate research fellowships.

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BENJAMIN E. SURPLESS / Geosciences and S. Thorne ’17 published “Segmentation of the Wassuk Range Normal Fault System, Nevada (USA): Implications for Earthquake Rupture and Walker Lane Dynamics” in Geological Society of America Bulletin in 2021.

KATHLEEN D. SURPLESS / Geosciences co-published “Leveraging Detrital Zircon Geochemistry to Study Deep Arc Processes: REE-Rich Magmas Mobilized by Jurassic Rifting of the Sierra Nevada Arc” in Results in Geochemistry in 2021.

SHENG TAN / Computer Science co-published “EarDynamic: An Ear Canal Deformation Based Continuous User Authentication Using In-Ear Wearables” in Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 2021, Vol. 5, Issue 1.

ASHA MARY THOMAS / Biology, G. Meeks ’19, C. Munõz-Rivera ’19, and colleagues published “Roles for a Lipid Phosphatase in the Activation of its Opposing Lipid Kinase” in Molecular Biology of the Cell, 2020, Vol. 31, Issue 17.

EMMA TREADWAY / Engineering Science and K. Journet* published “The Effect of Freespace Properties on Unilateral Stiffness Classification” in the Proceedings of the IEEE World Haptics Conference in 2021. This paper was also a finalist for the Best Paper Award at the conference. Treadway co-published “Vector Field Control Methods for Discretely Variable Passive

Robotic Devices” in IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2021, Vol. 37, Issue 2.

ADAM URBACH / Chemistry, E. Cha ’21, N. Clements*, C. Hofman ’19, B. Lavoie*, A. Van Zile ’21, and L. Warden ’21 contributed “Sequence Predictive Recognition of Proteins and Peptides by Synthetic and Natural Receptors” for Supramolecular Protein Chemistry: Assembly, Architecture, and Application with the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2020.

HARRY M. WALLACE / Psychology and Kevin P. McIntyre / Psychology published “Social Autonomy ≠ Social Empowerment: The Social Self-Restriction Model” in the Journal of Theoretical Social Psychology, 2021.

YU ZHANG / Computer Science, C. Zhang ’21, S. Liu ’20, and colleagues published “Age Prediction by DNA Methylation in Neural Networks” in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, 2021.

BRADY A. ZIEGLER / Geosciences co-published “Variability in groundwater flow and chemistry in the Mekong River alluvial aquifer (Thailand): implications for arsenic and manganese occurrence” in Environmental Earth Sciences, 2021, Vol. 80, Issue 6.

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STEM ROOTS IN DEI

Howard Hughes Medical Institute grant addresses STEM inclusivity

by Jeanna Goodrich Balreira ’08

Trinity has received a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) designed to make its first- and second-year STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) courses more inclusive to all students. Chaired by biology professor Michele Johnson, Ph.D., and co-chaired by chemistry professor Laura Hunsicker-Wang, Ph.D., the grant connects leaders from 100 schools via six learning community clusters.

Trinity’s cluster is composed of 15 schools—including large state schools, small private institutions, and community colleges—focused on the specific challenge of transforming introductory STEM courses to be inclusive.

But what does it mean for a STEM course to be inclusive? Johnson is glad we asked. She notes that the first phase of the grant encouraged 24 faculty and eight students to understand how Trinity defines inclusive teaching and learning, and what barriers may exist to achieving inclusivity and accessibility. “STEM has a reputation that is non-inclusive, a sense that it’s very hard to do well in STEM classes, and a misconception that if you don’t naturally have amazing STEM abilities, you will not succeed,” Johnson says. “We are working to change that impression.”

This is where the learning communities come in—not just on campus, but across the nation.

“We’re sharing ideas and resources among institutions that have very different kinds of ideas and resources,” Johnson says. “With the support of HHMI, we are trying to change undergraduate STEM education in this country, and we’re looking for ways to overcome challenges that are, in some ways, fairly universal. Elements of this process have made us realize that Trinity has resources that position us to really jump into this work.” Johnson cites Trinity’s Collaborative for Learning and Teaching, Student Diversity and Inclusion Office, and Office of Institutional Research and Effectiveness as infrastructure that puts the University on the path to facing these challenges head-on.

Faculty and students involved in the HHMI Inclusive Excellence Program gathered for an outdoor breakfast social at the conclusion of the Fall 2021 semester.

For many STEM faculty, this could mean facing fundamentals of their discipline’s canon, universal course design, or even the way they were taught to teach. “We faculty have very few models of [inclusive] teaching because we weren’t taught this way ourselves,” Johnson says. “We’re unlearning teaching strategies that are not supporting all of our students.

We’re reconsidering ways for our disciplines to satisfy student curiosity. And we’re learning new and effective strategies to facilitate group work and form student communities.”

To receive authentic and critical feedback from these student communities, the faculty have partnered with a paid student leadership council dubbed AXIS (Ambassadors for eXcellence In STEM). Through a series of formal and informal assessments of themselves and their peers, AXIS has developed a set of project ideas to address barriers to students feeling a sense of welcome and belonging in STEM courses. From active engagement and events to making connections in Trinity’s liberal arts curriculum, student projects focus on opportunities for transformation within the classroom and the community as a whole.

Regardless, the process of transformation is just as much a personal journey as it is an institutional one, Johnson says. “It’s clear that one of the biggest challenges in every institution, regardless of size or resources, is faculty time: It takes real time to reflect. It is real work to consider how your own personal identity might impact what you teach, and how your students’ identities might impact the way that they’re able to learn in your class.”

The University will continue to update the community with progress made on this grant as it seeks to live into its values of enduring excellence, perpetual discovery, and intentional inclusion. To learn more about all ongoing DEI initiatives at Trinity, visit gotu.us/IntentionalInclusion.

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SCIENTIFIC SUPPORT Faculty and students explore and discover through NSF grant funding

by Jeanna Goodrich Balreira ’08

Down the halls of Trinity University’s Center for the Sciences and Innovation (CSI) and the Marrs McLean Science Center (MMS), science is on display. Through sunlit, glass-walled laboratories, passers-by see students and faculty diligently working together with state-of-the-art equipment and digital technology. Underlying much of this work? Substantial support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) that fuels collaborative research.

In the Department of Chemistry, chemistry professor Christina Cooley, Ph.D., continues work through the NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development Program, armed with more than $400,000 for existing research and for curricular priorities.

Funding supports Cooley’s ongoing fluorogenic polymerization project, which aims to use light as an indicator for disease, potentially having a monumental impact in the fight to diagnose diseases in areas of the world where advanced imaging equipment might not be available.

“There are times where it seems impossible for faculty to ‘do it all’ at a high level,” Cooley says. “But then, to get this grant, it’s incredibly validating to know you don’t have to drop everything and put research on a pedestal—you can still do amazing research while also prioritizing relationships with your students.”

NSF grant funding also still fuels the lab of retired chemistry professor Bert Chandler, Ph.D., where undergraduates work alongside graduate assistants and post-docs to understand fundamental chemistry for industrially important model reactions involved in energy conversion, storage, and chemical production.

“I’ve been very fortunate to have constant NSF support for the past 15 plus years, which is in large part a testament to the students and postdocs who have worked with me,” Chandler says. “It is really tough to sustain this kind scientific work, especially working primarily with undergraduates who are constantly moving along the learning curve. We have had to develop methods that are robust enough to allow new students to contribute quickly. This has meant we can spend a little more time collecting the kinds of reactivity data many research groups aren’t interested in doing.”

Down the corridor of CSI and across the bridge to MMS, mathematics professor Hoa Nguyen, Ph.D., is collaborating with UC Berkeley biology professor Mimi Koehl, Ph.D., and Tulane University mathematics professor Lisa Fauci, Ph.D., to study cell morphologies. This project and several others on bacterial chemotaxis and collective motion have been conducted with the aid of 12 Trinity students, six of whom are fully supported by the grant.

“Thanks to the NSF grant, I was able to provide stipends to female and first-generation students, who are underrepresented in STEM,” Nguyen says. “The grant has had a significant impact on educating our undergraduates and supporting faculty and student interdisciplinary research activities.”

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One floor up, the Department of Geosciences is part of the Keck Geology Consortium. There, Benjamin Surpless, Ph.D., is using an NSF grant to support research of fault zones and coupled fold-fracture evolution. The series of grants, totaling more than $490,000, has allowed Surpless to involve a significant number of undergraduates in his investigations, including on field trips to southern Utah and West Texas.

Surpless and his team collect field data by flying unmanned aerial vehicle technology—you and I know them as ‘drones’—armed with high-tech cameras across major fault zones. “With drones, you can get at data that you couldn’t possibly get at without the additional step of climbing rocks,” Surpless says. “We can take what we’ve learned, and through data and analysis, we can apply it to a number of different fields: natural hazards such as earthquakes, the impact on groundwater flow, gas and oil recovery, and geothermal energy systems.”

Additionally, geosciences professor Daniel Lehrmann, Ph.D., is using an NSF grant to conduct collaborative research with the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay to understand the conditions of water-rock interaction. Lerhmann’s work has brought him and a team of Trinity undergraduate researchers to the Nanpanjiang Basin of South China to study carbonate rocks, and while the coronavirus pandemic halted travel to China for the last two summers, the team hopes to restart on-site research in Summer 2022.

“The most important thing about study abroad is that it opens the students’ minds to see that the world is different in other places and that the culture is different,” Lehrmann told San Antonio Magazine of his fourth research trip to China.

“It’s not a vacation—that’s one thing I try to let students know right away. China still has a lot of opportunities for discovery.”

And on the top floor of MMS, physics professor Jennifer Steele, Ph.D., is seeing the big picture through nanotechnology—miniscule structures that scientists can engineer to study and solve microscopic problems. Steele’s lab is currently studying fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET), a technique that scientists can use to measure the relative distance between microscopic molecules—such as the proteins in our cells—that are mere nanometers or ångströms apart.

An NSF grant has funded new equipment and eight summer stipends for Trinity undergraduates in Steele’s lab.

“We’re looking at a problem that needs a new tool,” Steele says, “and we are designing a structure that will give us a better understanding of the problem and the solution.”

Read more about faculty work throught NSF grants at gotu.us/facultystories.

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L FTY GOALS Trinity-founded institute aims to unite Hispanic student leaders nationwide words by Jeremy Gerlach photos by Ryan Sedillo

T

rinity University political science professor Juan Sepúlveda’s life has been chock-full of incredible experiences. He’s

Trinity’s Calgaard Distinguished Professor of Practice, was a former member of the Obama administration and a member of the Biden-Harris transition team, and served as a senior vice president at PBS—and that’s after earning degrees from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford.

But what’s one experience even Sepúlveda wishes he’d had when he was a young student?

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“Trinity is a small, liberal arts college. We make connections.

That’s how we see the world.”

It’s attending a program like the Latinx on Fast Track (LOFT) Leadership Institute—a partnership between Trinity University and the Hispanic Heritage Foundation (HHF) that Sepúlveda and HHF CEO/ President Antonio Tijerino launched in Summer 2021. The institute brings together some of the top Latinx graduating high school seniors in the country for an interactive series of seminars on leadership, community-building, and career exploration.

“I would have loved to have something like this as a kid,” says Sepúlveda. “All the networks and the communities I’ve built over my career, a program like this brings those together before you’ve even hit college. I told the LOFT participants, ‘I hope you guys like each other, because no matter where you go, or what you do, you’re going to be running into each other a lot!’”

LOFT serves the youth recognized by the Hispanic Heritage Youth Awards, an HHF program that brings together the most talented 270 Latinx students in the country—out of a field of more than 30,000 nominees—who receive a grant to continue their education or to support a community-based project or idea.

Sepúlveda launched LOFT with the goal of getting those students interacting both with each other and with Latinos and Latinas who are already stars in their prospective career fields.

These 270 students, once selected, were organized into nine career tracks, sponsored by nine industry players: health care and science (CVS Health), engineering (BP), tech (T-Mobile), education

(Southwest Airlines), public service (Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute), finance (East Los Capital), entrepreneurship (TikTok), and social justice (Nike).

Students in each track then heard from guest speakers representing those fields as well as formed friendships and ties with each other.

“Most of these students don’t have these types of networks built already,” Sepúlveda says. “They need to be able to see and meet the people who have gone into these fields before them.”

Sepúlveda says students in each of these tracks got to “take a deep dive” into these career fields, asking big questions of the guest speakers: “What does it really mean to be an entrepreneur? What does it really mean to be in education?” But in the fashion of a true liberal arts faculty member, Sepúlveda also excelled at constructing the program to highlight the connections between disciplines. “We got students thinking about how these tracks connect, how there’s crossover,” Sepúlveda says. “Trinity is a small, liberal arts college.

We make connections. That’s how we see the world.

People are willing to go deep into their subjects, but our students weren’t thinking about being in silos.”

Additionally, Sepúlveda enlisted Trinity students to act as mentors for the LOFT Leadership Institute participants. “I wanted to honor them as ‘older brother and sister’ figures,” Sepúlveda says. “And this way, our students got to be part of the networking too. I want them to connect to all the corporations and sectors and to students. I wanted them to have that leadership experience.” trinity.edu/impact-magazine IMPACT

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previous page Juan Sepúlveda speaks with Trinity students Sabrina Cuaro Cuaro and Tomás Peña in the Ruth Taylor courtyard. right Cuaro Cuaro and Peña listen as Sepúlveda discusses mentorship opportunities with the LOFT program.

“If we want to be a national player with Latino leaders, we need to do more national programs like LOFT.”

It’s no surprise, then, that Thomás Peña ’22 and Sabrina Cuauro Cuauro ’23 both emerged from the program with a renewed sense of identity, direction, and vision for the future.

Peña, a double major in finance and business analytics and technology from Roma, Texas, was paired with LOFT students in the technology track. “It’s the intersection of everything I study, so it was a great chance for me to take that relevant experience and help the students out,” he says.

The biggest advice Peña had for the LOFT attendees was about finding a sense of belonging. “I was blown away by these students… taken aback by how accomplished they were,” Peña says. “But even having all these accomplishments, everyone always has a sense of imposter syndrome. I got to talk about when I was in their position, first getting to college: Did I belong here?”

Peña continues, “It can be a learning curve to believe that your presence at school, at an internship, in a job, is deserved. And when I got my internship at Dell Technologies, my manager told me, ‘Hey, you’re always the third person to talk. Let yourself be seen and be heard.’ That speaks to so much of the Latino experience and the importance of representation. A program like the LOFT Institute shows us Latino leaders from 42

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Facebook, Apple, and we’re hearing about how they created a community wherever they’ve gone.

It is a really positive message.”

Cuauro Cuauro is a psychology, global Latinx studies, and Spanish triple major from Katy, Texas, who was matched with the health care and science track. She says the LOFT Institute represents just one step among many that Trinity is making to continue to build communities for Latinos and Latinas on campus.

“I came to Trinity because it was a small liberal arts university, and I didn’t learn about the history of the Latinx community until I got here,” Cuauro Cuauro says. “I became a global Latinx studies major right at a time when I felt unsure of my identity. I joined Dr. Sepúlveda’s Latinx leadership class, which has made a huge difference for me. And I’m currently the president of the Trinity University Latino Association.”

But getting to network with the LOFT students—hailing from a nationwide network—was an entirely new type of community-building experience for Cuauro Cuauro. “What stood out to me the most was the potential these students had,” she says. “They have already accomplished so much. And hearing their stories as to why they wanted to go into health care, I was inspired

by them. So many of them have had experiences with family members who had an illness and were treated differently or encountered different obstacles because of their identity.”

For a student interested in a career in clinical psychology, this hit close to home for Cuauro Cuauro. “Mental illness can present differently in people of different identities, who have different stigmas surrounding these issues,” she says. “And so much of the existing research in psychology isn’t ‘cross cultural, so I want to do research that focuses on different people’s perspectives.”

The LOFT Leadership Institute, which is currently taking applications for Summer 2022, aims to keep growing, according to Sepúlveda.

“I want to expand the program to bring high school students to Trinity earlier, before they’re seniors,” Sepúlveda says. “This year we were remote, so I would love to do more of this in person. I would love to bring [the students] all to Trinity, as well as to [Washington ]D.C. to the Hispanic Heritage Foundation. We’re also looking at expanding with more sponsors and adding a sports and fitness track. I want our network to grow, and as more students come back and do the program with us, I want them to be the ones leading sessions, helping run the whole thing.”

These are lofty goals, Sepúlveda notes, but the right goals for a university like Trinity that’s trying to build a better network for its Latinx students. “If we want to be a national player with Latino leaders, we need to do more national programs like we’ve done with LOFT,” he says. “And it’s such a huge benefit to have Trinity students helping us lead, helping us run these programs.”

While Trinity did not have any incoming students as participants in the LOFT Leadership Institute, Sepúlveda says future editions of the program will benefit from having voices like Cuauro Cuauro and Peña on board.

And as these two can attest, this benefit is a two-way street. “The relationships Dr. Sepúlveda has built with major players in these career fields, we’re able to ask them questions, hear their stories, hear how they’ve made it. This was really inspiring,” Cuauro Cuauro says.

“I feel really confident that I have the skills I need; I belong here,” Peña says. “I would say that after four years at Trinity, and being through programs like the Latinx Leadership class, the Trinity University Latino Association, and now LOFT, it’s not that these things changed my identity: My identity has been amplified.”

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Amy F. Holmes, Ph.D., was nominated for the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) International “Innovations That Inspire” program for her development of “Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability,” a new course at Trinity University that will be featured in the 2021 online catalog of innovative programs offered at AACSB-accredited business schools around the world.

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BUSINESS and SOCIAL SCIENCES The University’s business and social science education is distinctively grounded in a balanced blend of liberal arts and applied professional programs, where faculty engage and prepare students for meaningful lives of leadership and service around the world. At Trinity, this area incorporates the Michael Neidorff School of Business (Accounting, Business Administration, and Finance and Decision Sciences) as well as Communication, Economics, Education, Health Care Administration, Political Science, and Sociology and Anthropology.

DENNIS AHLBURG / Economics co-authored “One Hundred Years of the Gender Gap in Examination Results at the University of Oxford” in History of Education, 2021, Vol. 50, Issue 2.

ENRIQUE ALEMÁN JR. / Education co-contributed “Uncovering internalized whiteness through Critical Race counterstories: Navigating our experiences in the state of Texas” for The Handbook of Critical Theoretical Research Methods in Education with Routledge in 2021. Alemán Jr. screened his documentary, Stolen Education, the story of eight Mexican-American schoolchildren who changed Texas educational history, for the Trinity community as part of Latinx Heritage Month.

LAURA ALLEN / Education was recognized by San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg ’99 for her participation as an inaugural fellow in the San Antonio Compassionate Institute 2020.

ROBERT M. BARNETT / Business Administration co-authored “Qualifying for USMCA Preferential Treatment” for Thomson-Reuters Practical Law in 2021.

ANGELA BREIDENSTEIN ’91, M’92 / Education and Laura Hunsicker-Wang / Chemistry presented “Advising 101” at the Trinity

Mentoring Summit. Breidenstein developed the gallery presentation for Trinity’s Department of Education profile for the Learning Policy Institute’s EdPrep Lab in 2021 and submitted a successful proposal for Trinity’s Master of Arts in Teaching program to take part in the statewide edTPA performance assessment pilot with the Texas Education Agency and national edTPA organization. Breidenstein was awarded $20,000 for the Trinity Prize for Excellence in Teaching from Whataburger on behalf of the Center for Educational Leadership and Department of Education. Breidenstein and Corina Maeder / Chemistry received funding from the Flora Cameron Foundation for Women in Science: High School Girls STEM Partnership with Trinity University, a project that supports high school students and teachers in science education.

The CENTER FOR EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP received a five-year, $1.5 million grant from the Elma Dill Russell Spencer Foundation in 2021.

This award will support a variety of capacity-building and programmatic efforts to expand the Department of Education’s reach into the broader community.

SEONGWON CHOI / Health Care Administration co-published three papers: “The Context, Strategy and

bolded Trinity faculty, staff, students, or alumni *Trinity undergraduate researchers

Performance of the American Safety Net Primary Care Providers: A Systematic Review” in the Journal of Health Organization and Management, 2020, Vol. 22, Issue 3; “The Association Between an Established Chief Experience Officer Role and Hospital Patient Experience Scores” in Patient Experience Journal, 2021, Vol. 8, Issue 1; and “COVID-19: Lessons from South Korean Pandemic Communications Strategy” in the International Journal of Healthcare Management, 2021, Vol. 14, Issue 1.

JORGE COLAZO / Finance and Decision Sciences and a colleague received a development grant in 2020 from the American Council on Education, in partnership with the Institute for Innovative Global Education at Kansai University and with support from the U.S. Embassy Tokyo and Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology as part of the rapid response summer intensive virtual exchange/ COIL (collaborative online international education) training program.

COURTNEY CRIM ’93, M’94 / Education was recognized by San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg ’99 for her participation as an inaugural fellow in the San Antonio Compassionate Institute 2020.

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Billy Freed

Jake Gray ’90

Alicia Guerrero ’15

John Hornbeak

PRACTICE WHAT YOU TEACH

Trinity’s in-residence faculty bring seasoned perspective to classrooms

by Jeremy Gerlach

At Trinity, in-residence faculty span the worlds of business, health care, and entrepreneurship, where teachers use decades of life experiences from a diverse set of career fields.

Trinity’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship employs two such positions: the Investor in Residence (IIR) Billy Freed, and the Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) Jake Gray ’90. Respectively, these two roles help students discover life as an entrepreneur and connect them with investment capital.

Freed, a serial entrepreneur and prominent investor in the San Antonio community, views his role in connecting student startups with investors as a yin-yang proposition: “It’s my job to tell students, ‘Go for it, but have your ducks properly lined up,’” Freed says. “I’m a guy who can call out mistakes on financial plans and help them revise them with realistic projections because I’m trying to push students using a real-world mindset.”

Gray, as EIR, says the best lesson is coming to terms with the “real experience” of being an entrepreneur: “To teach entrepreneurship at the undergraduate level is, yes, to tell students, ‘You can be great,’ but the life of an entrepreneur is not about wild successes. It’s a grind to build something from nothing. I’m telling students that what they’re signing up for is not a normal life—it’s not going to be a 9-5 job. That helps them discern whether or not they have that itch and those skills to be able to act on an idea.”

In the Department of Communication, Journalist in Residence Alicia Guerrero ’15 also runs a business of sorts: guiding the student boards that manage Trinity publications—the 46

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Trinitonian newspaper and the Mirage yearbook.

Guerrero, who herself served as the Trinitonian’s managing editor her senior year, brings real-world experience from her current role as the news producer for WOAI/KBB’s 5 p.m. newscast.

“You can learn everything there is to know about journalism, but it’s one thing to learn it in a classroom and another thing to execute it,” Guerrero says. “There are many Trinity students who want to do this when they graduate, so the networking opportunities and internship opportunities that I’m able to help them find, that’s what sets this position apart. Here at Trinity, I’m able to foster and grow our next generation of journalists.”

And over in Trinity’s Department of Health Care Administration (HCAD), John Hornbeak is helping foster the next generation of health care professionals and executives. A 20-year CEO for Methodist Healthcare System, he’s served as Trinity’s HCAD executive in residence since 2008, mentoring students, and serving as an adviser on class projects, noting that “a lot of what I do with students is when their assignments cover something they’ve never run into before. The faculty instructs, and I provide color commentary.”

No matter how big or small the question—or how late it comes, Hornbeak is there with an answer, or more often, more questions. “When students come for career advice, I can be a neutral sounding board,” Hornbeak says. “But I also have Trinity graduates several years out calling for advice; I tell them I live vicariously through their travails.”

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JESSE M. CROSSON / Political Science co-published four papers: “Polarized Pluralism: Organizational Preferences and Biases in the American Pressure System” in American Political Science Review, 2020, Vol. 114, Issue 4; “Large-N bill positions data from MapLight.org: What can we learn from interest groups’ publicly observable legislative positions?” in Interest Groups and Advocacy, 2020, Vol. 9, Issue 3; “Multiple vote electoral systems: a remedy for political polarization” in the Journal of European Public Policy in 2021; and “Resources and Agendas: Combining Walker’s Insights with New Data Sources to Chart a Path Ahead” in Interest Groups & Advocacy, 2021, Vol. 10, Issue 3.

ROCÍO DELGADO / Education, Ellen Barnett / Education, and K. Méndez Pérez* co-published “¿Qué es un código?: Supporting Emerging Multilingual Learners in Digital Literacy” in Science and Children, 2021, Vol. 58, Issue 5. Delgado made seven presentations: “Social emotional learning/Aprendizaje socioemocional,” presented with colleagues at Esparza Elementary in San Antonio in June 2020; “Developing Social Emotional Learning through Empatico and the San Antonio Compassion Institute 2020,” presented with Barnett, Heather Haynes Smith / Education, Courtney Crim / Education, and Laura Allen / Education and moderated by Carla Sierra / Strategic Communications and Marketing for the Trinity University Tiger Network webinar series in August 2020; “Fomentando el aprendizaje socioemocional a través de la literatura de niños en un salón bilingüe” at the Texas Association for Bilingual Education Conference in Houston in October 2020; “School Education & COVID,” presented with Barnett and Allen for the Trinity University Learning TUgether podcast series in December 2020; “COVID and

its Effect on K-12 Teaching and Learning,” presented with Enrique Alemán Jr. / Education, Diana Kenny ’94, M’01 / Education, Tess Coody-Anders ’93 / Strategic Communications and Marketing, and J. Harris* as part of a webinar series in partnership with KSAT-TV in December 2020; “Supporting dual language learners and their families in a hybrid environment,” presented with colleagues at the San Antonio Area Association for Bilingual Education in San Antonio in February 2021; and “Introspection and proactiveness: Serving multilingual learners, families, and communities” at the Trinity School Design Network in San Antonio in May 2021. Delgado was recognized by San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg ’99 for her participation as an inaugural fellow in the San Antonio Compassionate Institute 2020.

TIANXI DONG / Finance and Decision Sciences co-published “A Longitudinal Analysis of Job Skills for Entry-Level Data Analysts” in the Journal of Information Systems Education, 2020, Vol. 31, Issue 4. Dong co-presented “Aligning Business Intelligence and Analytics Curriculum with Industry Demand” at the Americas Conference on Information Systems in August 2020.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP’s Students + Startups program was named one of four finalists for the Excellence in Co-Curricular Innovation Award from the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship. This program is a partnership between Trinity, Geekdom, and the 80|20 Foundation.

GABRIEL GARCIA / Education was recognized by San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg ’99 for his participation as an inaugural fellow in the San Antonio Compassionate Institute 2020.

MARIO GONZÁLES-FUENTES / Business Administration, Kim R. Robertson / Business Administration, and J. Charlene Davis / Business Administration published “Creativity as a Reflective Learning Exercise: Informing Strategic Marketing Decisions Through Digital Storytelling” for the Marketing Education Review, 2021, Volume 31, Issue 2. González-Fuentes was appointed to the editorial review board for Marketing Education Review, a pedagogical journal.

AHREUM HAN / Health Care Administration co-published “The World Bank Education Sector: From Internal and External Perspectives” in the Journal of International Development Cooperation, 2021, Vol. 16, Issue 1. Han co-presented “Addressing Social Determinants of Health—Let Healthcare Administrators Be Part of the Solutions” at the Consortium of Universities for Global Health Conference in March 2021 and “Community Orientation in Hospitals in Texas: A Supply and Demand Approach” at the American Society for Public Administration Conference in April 2021.

JOHN R. HERMANN / Political Science published “Creating Successful Student Learning Outcomes: The Case of Trinity University’s Quality Enhancement Plan Entitled ‘Starting Strong’” in Sustainability, 2020, Vol. 12, Issue 19.

AMY F. HOLMES / Accounting and Ashley Douglass / Accounting published “Artificial Intelligence: Reshaping the Accounting Profession and the Disruption to Accounting Education’’ in the Journal of Emerging Technologies in Accounting in 2021.

Holmes was nominated for the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) International “Innovations That Inspire” program for her development of “Corporate Social Responsibility trinity.edu/impact-magazine IMPACT

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and Sustainability,” a new course at Trinity University that will be featured in the 2021 online catalog of innovative programs offered at AACSB-accredited business schools around the world.

AMER KAISSI / Health Care Administration published “Health Systems Face Converging Forces of Convenience, Value, and COVID-19” in Frontiers of Health Services Management, 2020, Vol. 37, Issue 2.

PATRICK KEATING / Communication published Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban as part of the 21st Century Film Essentials series with the University of Texas Press in 2021. Keating published “The Video Essay as Cumulative and Recursive Scholarship” in The Cine-Files, 2020, Issue 15 and “Style and Storytelling in the Hollywood Aesthetic” in Projections, 2020, Vol. 14, Issue 2. Keating contributed “The Video Essay and Classical Hollywood Studies” for Resetting the Scene: Classical Hollywood Revisited with Wayne State University Press in 2021. Keating was named a finalist for the Richard Wall Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association for his recent book, The Dynamic Frame: Camera Movement in Classical Hollywood.

JARED KOREFF / Accounting published “Are Auditors’ Reliance on Conclusions from Data Analytics Impacted By Different Data Analytic Inputs?” in the Journal of Information Systems in 2021. Koreff won the Best Paper Award for his co-authored paper, “Data Analytics (Ab)use in health care fraud audits,” at the American Accounting Association Government and Nonprofit Section Midyear Meeting in February 2021.

ZHAOXI LIU / Communication published “Illusion vs. Disillusion: Chinese Viewers’ Articulation of ‘House of 48

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Cards’” in Journalism and Media, 2021, Vol. 2, Issue 2. Liu contributed “Social Media and Chinese Journalists’ Pursuit of Press Freedom” for China in the Era of Social Media: An Unprecedented Force for An Unprecedented Social Change with Lexington Books in 2020.

DAVID A. MACPHERSON / Economics co-published Economics: Private & Public Choice, 17E with Cengage in 2020 and, with Roger W. Spencer / Economics, Lives of the Laureates: Thirty-Two Nobel Economists with MIT Press in 2020. Macpherson co-published “The Gender Wage Gap and the Fair Calculations Act” in the Journal of Forensic Economics, 2020, Vol. 29, Issue 1.

JENNIFER P. MATHEWS / Sociology and Anthropology contributed “Protecting the Archaeological Past in the Face of Tourism Demand” for Archaeology and Tourism: Touring the Past with Channel View Publications in 2020. Mathews presented her co-authored paper, “Distilling the Past Through the Present: Discussions With Contemporary U.S. Rum Makers for Understanding 19th Century Rum Making in the Yucatán Peninsula,” at the Transnational Construction of Mayaness conference in January 2021.

SHANA MCDERMOTT / Economics is co-editor for the Agricultural and Resource Economics Review and subject editor for Neobiota, an interdisciplinary invasive species journal.

McDermott presented “Climate Change Economics” to a Kiwanis club in Wisconsin, and she serves as a board member for the Friends of San Antonio Natural Areas nonprofit.

ALFRED MONTOYA / Sociology and Anthropology published “Making MSM: Biopolitical subjects in Vietnam” in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2020, Vol. 10, Issue 3 and “Becoming MSM: Sexual Minorities

and Public Health Regimes in Vietnam” in Open Anthropological Research, 2021, Vol.1, Issue 1. Montoya presented “Structural Violence and the Social Determinants of Health in San Antonio, TX” at the Healthcare Equity and Social Justice Around the Globe Symposium in March 2021.

Montoya was a panelist for three presentations: “Tembusu College Fellow’s Tea: Decolonizing Intelligence” at the National University of Singapore in Singapore in October 2020; “San Antonio Community Forum: A Just Climate + COVID-19 Recovery” for the City of San Antonio and the Sierra Club in San Antonio in October 2020; and “The COVID Pandemic: Impact on South Texas” for KSAT-TV in San Antonio in December 2020.

DOMINIC G. MORAIS / Business Administration, Camille Reyes / Communication, and a colleague published “Tap ‘Follow’ #FitFam: A Process of Social Media Microcelebrity” in Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health in 2021. Morais co-published “Legitimacy in Public Recreation: Examining Rhetorical Shifts in Institutional Creation and Maintenance” in Sport in Society, 2021, Vol. 24, Issue 2.

O. VOLKAN OZBEK / Business Administration published “The Market Success of Corporate Spin-offs: Do CEO External Directorships, Age, and Their Interactions Matter?” in the American Business Review, 2020, Vol. 23 and “Market Performance of Spun-Off Subsidiaries: Effects of Board Independence and Directors’ Industry Experience” in the American Business Review, 2021, Vol. 24. Ozbek co-published “The Influence of CEO Duality and Board Size on the Market Value of Spun-Off Subsidiaries: The Contingency Effect of Firm Size” in the Journal of Strategy and Management, 2020, Vol. 13, Issue 3. Ozbek presented “Explaining speed of internationalization via affective conflict and uncertainty”

Luis Martinez speaks to the participants, judges, and crowd at the 2019 Stumberg Competition.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP CENTER RECEIVES NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION Program receives a $346,079 grant from U.S. Economic Development Administration alongside an international award

by Carla Sierra

Trinity University was named a 2021 recipient of a $346,079 “Build to Scale’’ Program grant, which is administered annually by the U.S. Economic Development Administration (USEDA). Trinity was one of only 50 organizations, including nonprofits, higher education institutions, and state government agencies, across the country to receive funding. The “Build to Scale” program aims to accelerate technology entrepreneurship by increasing inclusive access to business support and startup capital.

“The ‘Build to Scale’ program strengthens entrepreneurial ecosystems across the country that are essential in the Biden administration’s efforts to build back better,” Secretary of Commerce Gina M. Raimondo says. “This work is critical in developing the innovation and entrepreneurship our country needs to build back better and increase American competitiveness on the global stage.”

“Trinity is the only predominantly undergraduate serving institution ever awarded a similar USEDA grant,” says Luis Martinez ’91, Ph.D., director of the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. “There are no other top 25 national liberal arts and science colleges and universities who can claim this kind of award and this kind of program.

“A critical need exists in San Antonio for high-risk, pre-seed, and seed capital that will assist startups with a potential for high impact to advance to the next growth stage,” Martinez continues. “Trinity will launch a Student-Managed Early Venture Fund (SMEVF) and Trinity Angels to increase seed and early-stage equity capital for high-growth ventures in San Antonio and the USEDA Austin region.”

By 2027, Martinez projects investments in more than 50 companies in the region, the creation of more than 125 new jobs, and evergreen support for Trinity’s SMEVF. The entrepreneurship program also received a major international award this fall. The Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers (GCEC) awarded Trinity the highest award that a university entrepreneurship center can receive: 2021 GCEC Nasdaq Center for Entrepreneurial Excellence Award for schools with 5,000 students or fewer.

The Nasdaq award honors those centers that have made and will continue to make enormous contributions in advancing entrepreneurship as the force in economic growth throughout the world. Trinity was selected for the breadth, quality, and longevity of its entrepreneurship program, which includes its experiential learning curriculum, partnerships with Geekdom, Students+Startups, Launch SA, and 1 Million Cups San Antonio, as well as the Louis H. Stumberg New Venture Competition and Trinity Venture Mentoring Service.

Martinez was recently appointed to the executive board of the GCEC, which is the premier academic organization of more than 250 leading university entrepreneurship programs, addressing the emerging topics of importance to the nation’s university-based entrepreneurship programs.

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at the annual Academy of International Business - U.S. Southeast Chapter conference in October 2020. He completed the Teaching in Online and Hybrid Classes: Key Elements for Success workshop offered by Harvard Business Publishing Education. Additionally, Ozbek’s co-authored article “The Right People in the Wrong Places: The Paradox of Entrepreneurial Entry and Successful Opportunity Realization” in the Academy of Management Review, 2015, Vol. 41, was the basis of the YouTube video, “How to Spot Entrepreneurs Who Are Likely to Crash and Burn.”

MARIA P. PAGANELLI / Economics published “Adam Smith and the Origins of Political Economy” in Social Philosophy and Policy, 2020, Vol. 37, Issue 1.

CAMILLE REYES / Communication published “Neither Public, nor Private: Inventing PBS Television, 1965-67” in Journalism History, Vol. 47, Issue 1.

RICARDO MANUEL SANTOS / Economics published “FIFA World Cup: A Case of (In)efficiency of the Betting Market” in the International Journal of Sport Finance, 2020, Vol. 15, Issue 3.

ROBERT F. SCHERER / School of Business and Eugenio Dante Suárez / Finance and Decision Sciences co-published “México, the Americas, and Spain Perspectives and IB Education Innovations: ¿Hacia Dónde Vamos?” in the Journal of Teaching in International Business, 2020, Vol. 31, Issue 4.

PATRICK SHAY ’03, M’05 / Health Care Administration co-published “The COVID-19 fallout: Understanding healthcare management student perspectives on the shift from in-person to remote course instruction” in the Journal of Health Administration Education, 2021, Vol. 38, Issue 1 and “Do Organizational Characteristics of 50

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Lung Procurement Operations Matter: The Association Between Transplant Center Centrality and Volume With Total Ischemic Time” in Transplantation in 2021. Shay presented “Looking back, looking ahead: Lessons learned from the administrative residency” and co-presented “Resilience: Building strength for the road ahead” at the Association of University Programs in Healthcare Administration (AUPHA) Annual Meeting in June and July 2020.

Shay was invited to be a panelist for “Teaching Innovation and Entrepreneurism” in February 2021 and was invited to co-present “Innovative and Creative Teaching Approaches and Methods” in March 2021, both for the AUPHA Webinar Series.

SUSSAN SIAVOSHI / Political Science began a five-year appointment as editor-in-chief of Iranian Studies, one of the leading journals in the field of Middle Eastern studies, in January 2021.

HEATHER HAYNES SMITH ’97, M’98 / Education co-contributed “Moving Forward: The Role of Reflection in Planning Literacy Instruction” for Fundamentals of Literacy Instruction & Assessment, Pre-K–6 with Brookes Publishing in 2020. Smith and Simran Jeet Singh ’06 published “The Complexity of Characters: Representing Disability” for Diverse Book Finder, and Smith published “How A Science-Based Approach Can Improve Reading Outcomes in Texas Schools” as commentary in the San Antonio Report, both in 2020. Smith was invited to co-present “Using Cross-institutional Inquiry to Support Teacher Preparation for Deeper Learning” at the EdPrepLab Fall Forum in November 2020, and Smith co-presented “Putting it All Together: Chapter 19 Book Study,” a Facebook webinar for The Science of Teaching Reading in December 2020. Smith presented “The Science of Reading at Home” at Lamar Elementary in December 2020 and

“The Science of Reading in the Elementary Classroom” at The Winston School of San Antonio 31st Annual Learning Symposium in January 2021, both in San Antonio. Smith was recognized by San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg ’99 for her participation as an inaugural fellow in the San Antonio Compassionate Institute 2020.

AMY L. STONE / Sociology and Anthropology published “When My Parents Came to the Gay Ball: Comfort Work in Adult Child–Parent Relationships” in the Journal of Family Issues, 2021, Vol. 42, Issue 5. Stone co-published “The Moderating Effect of Resilience on the Relationship between Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and Quality of Physical and Mental Health among Adult Sexual and Gender Minorities” in Behavioral Medicine, 2020, Vol. 46, Issue 3-4 and “How Often Were You Traumatized?

Reconceptualizing Adverse Childhood Experiences for Sexual and Gender Minorities” in the Journal of Affective Disorders, 2021, Vol. 282. Stone contributed “Wearing Pink in Fairy Town: The Heterosexualization of the Spanish Town Neighborhood and Carnival Parade in Baton Rouge” for The Life and Afterlife of Gay Neighborhoods: Renaissance and Resurgence with Springer in 2021.

EUGENIO DANTE SUÁREZ / Finance and Decision Sciences co-published “Interdisciplinary Faculty-Led Summer Study Abroad Linking Liberal Arts and Professional Programs” and “Teaching Business With Internationally Built Teams” for the Journal of Teaching in International Business, 2020, Vol. 31, Issue 4.

JACOB K. TINGLE ’95 / Business Administration and Allison Hawk ’88 co-contributed “Case study 11.1” for Digital sport marketing: Concepts, cases, and conversations with Routledge in 2021. Tingle was selected to serve

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as an associate editor for Recreational Sports Journal and was appointed to the editorial board of the Journal of Amateur Sport for a three-year term.

DELI YANG / Business Administration published the third edition of Understanding and Profiting from Intellectual Property in International Business: Strategies Across Borders with Palgrave MacMillan in 2021.

WENJING YAO / Finance and Decision Sciences co-published “Private-equity commercial real estate, timberland, and farmland: market integration and information transition dynamics” in the Canadian Journal of Forest Research, 2020, Vol. 50, Issue 11.

Jorge Colazo advises students in Trinity’s finance program.

DIANA K. YOUNG / Finance and Decision Sciences co-published “A Conceptual Replication of the Unified Model of Information Security Policy Compliance” in AIS Transactions on Replications Research, 2020, Vol. 6.

by Carla Sierra

JORGE COLAZO NAMED ASSOCIATE DEAN OF STRATEGIC INITIATIVES AND RESEARCH Colazo to ensure Neidorf School of Business sustains community connections and student engagement synergy

Jorge Colazo, Ph.D., has been named the associate dean of strategic initiatives and research for Trinity University's Michael Neidorff School of Business (NSB). Colazo is an associate professor and chair for the Department of Finance and Decision Sciences. His goal for this new role is to guarantee the NSB will continue its active community connections and experiential learning opportunities and remain focused on Trinity becoming a top 25 nationally-ranked university in the area of liberal arts. He will also manage the school’s AACSB International re-accreditation.

Colazo has been instrumental in partnering Trinity with Dell, H-E-B, USAA, and other companies in and out of the classroom. He also emphasizes partnerships with local nonprofits to show students the real-world community impact of their class projects. His classes have worked with organizations such as RAICES (Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services), Goodwill Industries of San Antonio, the San Antonio Food Bank, and other nonprofits.

“By participating in community projects, our students are now making an impact on society because they are learning a lot more than statistics or finance,” Colazo says. “They are also learning, for instance, about the sociology and anthropology aspect of a project as they work on local, national, or global issues that are clearly multifaceted.

“Our students are learning hands-on about the importance of diversity and of understanding people’s different needs, and about the value of giving back,” he continues. “They are being forced to step outside of their comfort zones, allowing them to gain new perspectives on life. That, for me, is the definition of learning.” trinity.edu/impact-magazine IMPACT

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Russell McMindes ’02 was named the 2020-21 Men’s Tennis Coach of the Year by the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference.

Works / STAFF

STAFF Staff at Trinity University are lifelong learners whose talents grow the University as an exceptional place to study and work. They contribute diverse backgrounds and perspectives to the culture of the University, serving as leaders, mentors, and role models for the campus community. Staff create new and innovative advances in higher education, propelling the education of the whole student forward.

ACADEMIC AFFAIRS launched Empowering Department Chairs to Lead and Implement Change, a program created from a two-year, grant-funded initiative designed to empower 10 of the 27 current department chairs in distinct ways to better serve their departments and the strategic goals of Trinity University.

MARGUERITE AVERY / Trinity University Press has been named a member of the inaugural editorial board for the Center for Art, Design, and Social Research, a private, nonprofit educational institution that provides instruction in and conducts research on the relationship of art and design to global societies. She also completed her term as editorial board director for Pacific University Press, a library-sponsored scholarly publishing program.

LAPÉTRA BOWMAN / Academic Advising received the NACADA Outstanding Advising Administrator award in May 2021. NACADA is a global association that promotes and supports quality academic advising in higher education institutions.

THE CENTER FOR EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING AND CAREER SUCCESS was selected for honorable mention in the National Association of Colleges and Employers’ annual awards (small institution category) for its TigerWorks program.

STEPHANIE ENOCH / Strategic Communications and Marketing presented “What we learned from migrating 80+ sites during uncertainty” at DrupalCon North America in April 2021.

SEAN ETHEREDGE / Athletics was named the Men’s Golf Coach of the Year by the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference for the 2020-21 season.

LISA JASINSKI / Academic Affairs co-published Faculty as Global Learners: Off Campus Study at Liberal Arts Colleges with Lever Press in 2020 and published “Stepping Down?: Theorizing the process of returning to the faculty after senior academic leadership” in the Journal of Research on the College President, 2020, Vol. 4.

Jasinski was also awarded a 202122 American Council on Education Fellowship.

BOB KING / Athletics along with Athletics and Facilities Services staff collaborated on the Bell Center Expansion and Renovation Project, which was voted the “Best Education Project of the Year” by the San Antonio Business Journal in May 2021.

RUSSELL MCMINDES ’02 / Athletics was named the Men’s Tennis Coach of the Year by the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference for the 2020-21 season.

bolded Trinity faculty, staff, students, or alumni *Trinity undergraduate researchers

TRINITY UNIVERSITY PRESS won an award for best cover design from the Association of University Presses for The Duchess of Angus. Trinity University Press publication Terroir: Love, Out of Place was a shortlist finalist of hundreds of entries for the PEN Award for Art of the Essay.

JIMMY SMITH / Athletics was named the Men’s Basketball CoCoach of the Year by the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference for the 2020-21 season.

CARLA SPENKOCH / Athletics was named the Women’s Golf Coach of the Year by the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference for the 2020-21 season.

SCOTT TROMPETER / Athletics and his coaching staff were named the Swimming & Diving Coaching Staff of the Year by the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference for both men’s and women’s competition in the 2020-21 season.

MARCUS WHITEHEAD / Athletics and his coaching staff were named the Track & Field Coaching Staff of the Year by the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference for both men’s and women’s competition in the 2020-21 season.

trinity.edu/impact-magazine IMPACT

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Works / STAFF

Lisa Jasinski participates in a workshop in the Collaborative for Learning and Teaching.

LISA JASINSKI NAMED TO ACE FELLOWS PROGRAM Special assistant to the vice president of Academic Affairs wins prestigious fellowship

by Madeline Freeman ’23

Lisa Jasinski, Ph.D., special assistant to the vice president of academic affairs at Trinity University, was selected to be a 2021-22 American Council on Education (ACE) Fellow and is spending 12 weeks of the current academic year at the University of New Mexico (UNM).

Since its inception in 1965, the ACE Fellows Program has aimed to strengthen emerging leaders in institutions of higher education. Of the fellows who have participated to date, more than 80% have gone on after their fellowship to serve as chief executive officers, chief academic officers, other cabinet-level positions, and deans.

One of Jasinski’s main goals through this program is to learn how to better promote diversity and inclusion through policies and structural decisions. As a committed internationalist and future Fulbright specialist, she continues to value creating cross-cultural connections and fostering inclusivity.

“I’m really excited about being part of a cohort of really diverse people, learning from them, and recognizing that those are things that I can bring back to Trinity,” she says.

“Sometimes the best way to learn about yourself is to engage with people who are different. When I have a seat at

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the table where decisions are made, I try to take that spirit of allyship seriously and to think about how to bring other people into the conversation.”

Some of the other fellows Trinity has nominated in the past include classical studies professor Thomas E. Jenkins, Ph.D., former economics professor Jorge Gonzalez, Ph.D., and former chemistry professor and assistant vice president for special projects Steven Bacharach, Ph.D. After their ACE fellowships, Jenkins became the director of the Collaborative for Learning and Teaching at Trinity, Gonzalez became the president of Kalamazoo College in Michigan, and Bachrach became the dean of the School of Science at Monmouth University in New Jersey. Trinity has also hosted fellows including Dwight J. Fennell, Ph.D., who is the president of Texas College in Tyler, Texas.

Lapétra Bowman speaks with IMPACT on a sunny day on Trinity’s campus.

PASSION AND COMMITMENT

Trinity advising program director wins NACADA Outstanding Advising Administrator Award

Julie Jenkins celebrates after clinching an undefeated SCAC season in October.

by Sydney Rhodes ’23

Lapétra Bowman, Ph.D., is the kind of woman who will tell you she’s nervous to be on a Zoom call, then start talking about her job with such unapologetic passion that you wonder how she could be nervous about anything.

Officially, as Trinity’s director for academic advising, Bowman has turned Trinity’s academic advising model on its head. Unofficially, Bowman is a champion for student success and a great conversation partner.

Her door is open for advising questions and Netflix commentary, and she’s not afraid to shake things up to create positive change.

“We hope that the advisers are oftentimes one of the first people a student might trust on campus.”

That last quality is exactly why she was recognized as this year’s NACADA Outstanding Advising Administrator.

After Trinity’s Quality Enhancement Plan identified first-year advising as an area needing improvement, Bowman was hired to restructure the model. In the summer of 2020, Trinity officially shifted from a faculty advising model to a total-intake advising model. Professional academic advisers began to onboard and advise first-year students, working with them until their major declaration (at which point the students will be reassigned to faculty advisers in their academic areas of interest).

Not only has Bowman been the cornerstone for the recent overhaul of the first-year advising process, but she also outpaces everyone in passion.

“We hope that the advisers are oftentimes one of the first people a student might trust on campus,” Bowman says. “Academic advising is so many things. It’s not just about picking classes, but it’s also about understanding who the student is academically, who the student is personally, and making the connections between those two spaces. Helping students pivot when they need to, helping students troubleshoot and rise from the ashes when they have had a moment where they just felt really beaten down. We’re there to remind students about how amazing and resilient they are.”

1,000 AND COUNTING

Head volleyball coach Julie Jenkins reaches milestone career victories

by Molly Mohr Bruni

In Fall 2021, Trinity University head volleyball coach Julie Jenkins became just the third coach in Division III history to reach 1,000 career victories. She is the 10th coach and only the second woman across any NCAA division to achieve that milestone.

Having just finished her 37th season at the helm of the Tigers, Coach Jenkins leads active NCAA DIII volleyball coaches in terms of victories. Since taking the reins in 1985, Jenkins has chalked up a Trinity record of (987-403) (.710) and a Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference record of 369-38 (.907). Her teams have won 30 or more matches in 19 seasons.

“I’m a big believer in motivating by creating a positive, encouraging and challenging environment, by focusing on what the players are doing well (in addition to how they can improve), and letting them know that I believe in them,” Jenkins says. “All of our players also motivate each other by holding each other accountable and being appreciative of everyone’s role and contribution to the team.” trinity.edu/impact-magazine IMPACT

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A NOTE FROM MEGAN MUSTAIN Vice President for Academic Affairs I arrived in San Antonio to begin my role as Trinity’s vice president for Academic Affairs in mid-June of 2021—just days after the summer undergraduate research program started. With more than 300 students and 90 faculty participating in experiential learning opportunities, my first days on campus allowed me to experience firsthand the infectious energy that I had previously only heard about during my interviews. In what I am coming to know to be Trinity’s signature culture, my first few days on campus were marked by spirited conversations with students and their faculty mentors, each eager to tell me about their current projects in the research lab, the archive, the stage, the workplace, and the San Antonio community.

What a gift it has been to join an intellectual community where knowledge is created and shared so freely! Learning together is what we do.

So much of how we work has changed in the past two years. Many classes shifted to virtual platforms, research projects were reimagined due to the temporary closure of archives or travel restrictions, artistic performances continued despite physical distance, and daily business operations came to be carried out from the comfort of home offices. What has not changed, however, is Trinity’s shared commitment to engaging in forms of scholarship, research, and creative activity that possess the capacity to transform our students, ourselves, our disciplines, and our world.

Perhaps never before have our intellectual contributions mattered more. Despite the lingering effects and uncertainties of the pandemic, I remain deeply hopeful that our shared commitment to engaging in the work that matters most will buoy our spirits so that we can keep going. We will

“Our campus has never been better equipped to support a new generation of cross-disciplinary endeavors in teaching, learning, and discovery.”

Given that so many of these collaborations shifted online during the previous summer, it seemed to me that everyone had channeled a year’s worth of Zoom fatigue into a renewed sense of gratitude and purpose. A return to on-campus summer research and internships allowed us to feel that, in small but important ways, things were once again as they should be. Trinity has long been a place where learning and discovery happens every minute of every day, and—once again—these activities are being carried out in person. With the recent completion of renovations to Halsell Center, the ongoing construction of Dicke Hall, and the planned renovation of the Chapman Center, our campus has never been better equipped to support a new generation of cross-disciplinary endeavors in teaching, learning, and discovery.

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continue to pose and explore difficult questions, forge unexpected connections across disciplines, create beauty in dark times, band together across our differences, and demonstrate a steadfast commitment to ourselves and our students at a time when we can all benefit from a little extra understanding. Our world is made just a little bit richer every time Trinity’s teacher-scholars ask a worthwhile question, inch ahead toward a new breakthrough, or equip a student to go beyond what they imagined to be possible.

In gratitude, Megan Mustain Vice President for Academic Affairs

I feel tremendous excitement that Dicke Hall is going to be home to the Humanities at Trinity. When the doors finally open, I hope to see a lot of activity and interaction not only between students from different departments, but also between faculty and their students.

– Tim O’Sullivan, Ph.D. professor and chair, classical studies co-chair, chapman-halsell-dicke complex project

One Trinity Place San Antonio, Texas 78212-7200 Change service requested.

I chose to research and teach at a primarily undergraduate institution because my energy comes from working with students. At Trinity, teaching is a huge part of my job, but we aren’t sacrificing anything from our research. And in that environment, the risk is low, but the potential outcome is as high as it’s going to get anywhere else.

– Bethany Strunk, Ph.D., Biology