IMPACT | 2017-18

SCHOLARSHIP, CREATIVITY, & COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT TRINITY UNIVERSITY 2017-2018

F L IP A HEA D “Flipped” classrooms energize students and professors across disciplines + Droning on in Utah + Art meets Biology + LGBTQ research changes the San Antonio community

Trinity faculty are living scholars-teachers who are not satisfied with past achievements, but who read new books and think modern thoughts and expect to expand in soul as long as they live.

They are still students— and ambitious ones at that.

Editorial

trinitonian, march 1901

Contents / NO. 3, 2017-2018

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N 3 Departments

8 FLIP AHEAD “Flipped” classrooms energize students and professors across disciplines

BY JEREMY GERLACH

2 LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT 3 RESEARCH & ACHIEVEMENT 14 ARTS & HUMANITIES 26 SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, & MATHEMATICS 36 BUSINESS & SOCIAL SCIENCES 48 STAFF 52 DIALOGUE WITH DR. DEE

22 SHIFTING THE FIELD Trinity team uses drones to 3D map fault lines, opening possibilities for exploration

BY JEREMY GERLACH

32 ART, TO A SCIENCE Art major and biology professor study the aesthetics of microorganisms

BY NICOLETTE GOOD '07

43 POINT OF PRIDE Trinity team studies resilience of San Antonio’s LGBTQ community

BY MIRIAM SITZ GREBEY ’10

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Letter / FROM THE PRESIDENT

SCHOLARSHIP, CREATIVITY, & COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

2017-2018 EDITORIAL BOARD Jeanna Goodrich Balreira ’08 /Editor Molly Mohr Bruni /Managing Editor Jeremy Gerlach /Writer Anh-Viet Dinh ’15 /Photographer David Ribble ’82 /Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs & Professor of Biology Peggy Sundermeyer /Director of Sponsored Research ADVISORY COMMITTEE Victoria Aarons /English

Anderson gives remarks at Growing TUgether, Trinity’s inaugural staff development day, in July 2018.

Angela Breidenstein ’91, ’92 /Education Katie Carpenter /Director of Foundation Relations Jorge Colazo /Finance and Decision Sciences Jane Costanza /Library Jason Johnson /History Patrick Shay ’03, ’05 /Heath Care Administration Carl Leafstedt /Music Jennifer Mathews /Sociology and Anthropology Maria Paganelli /Economics Heather Sullivan /Modern Languages and Literatures Adam Urbach /Chemistry Harry Wallace /Psychology RESEARCH INTERNS Reese Murphy ’18 Henry Seward ’18 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: jgoodri1@trinity.edu Phone: 210-999-8406

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s we celebrate our 150th anniversary , I am reminded of the resilient and innovative spirit of those who founded Trinity.

This same spirit is alive and well in our faculty, whose commitment to innovation and to instilling a passion for lifelong learning in our students have come to define the Trinity experience.

The breadth and depth of research and publishing featured in this issue of IMPACT reflect Trinity’s unique approach to a liberal arts and pre-professional education. From an exploration of magmatic activities to Alzheimer’s research, and from providing expertise on affairs in the Middle East to hosting lectures with world-renowned novelists, our faculty are making a difference. In their pursuit of excellence, our faculty and staff transport our students intellectually—and physically, in some cases— to new worlds and new futures.

Beyond the classroom, Trinity enjoys a robust relationship with San Antonio, where faculty and students collaborate with community members to advance research on social issues. One result is significant progress in understanding of LGBTQ resilience and access to important social services within San Antonio. Still other faculty members have helped the region understand tourism’s economic impact on the city. And the work that both our students and faculty are doing in the areas of entrepreneurship, experiential learning, and international engagement brings the University together with the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation as our students build bridges with businesses locally and globally.

These and many more advances are celebrated in this special anniversary edition. I invite you to read more about our enterprising faculty and staff as they help set the course for Trinity’s next 150 years.

Best regards,

Fax: 210-999-8449

READ IMPACT ONLINE: MAGAZINE.TRINITY.EDU/IMPACT

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IMPACT 2017-2018

Danny J. Anderson President, Trinity University

Research / GRANTS & 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 governmental agencies.

Faculty or Academic Staff with Grant Awards, 2013-18

Rolling Average of Expenditures from All Externally Sponsored Sources, 2013-17 $18 mil

92

$16,601,868

$16 mil $13,793,906

$14 mil

$12,689,429

$12 mil $10 mil $8 mil $6 mil

Between 2013-18, 92 members of the faculty or academic staff held at least one grant award.

$4 mil

$5,533,956

$4,597,969

$4,229,810

2014-16

2015-17

$2 mil $0

(that’s about 35% of Trinity’s full-time faculty members)

Source: Office of Sponsored Research, July 2018

2013-15

Total Expenditures (3-year rolling average)

Average per-year expenditures

Source: Office of Sponsored Research, July 2018 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, 2015-18

Number of Proposals Submitted by the Office of Sponsored Research, 2017-18

80 75

74 72

70

73 70

65 60 55 50

49

48

48 45

45 0

2015

2016

Number of active grants and contracts managed

2017

2018

Fiscal Year 2017

Fiscal Year 2018

proposals

proposals

55 58

Number of faculty with at least one managed award

Source: Office of Sponsored Research, July 2018

Source: Office of Sponsored Research, July 2018

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 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, and research.

Z.T. SCOTT AWARD Claudia Stokes English Professor and Chair Recognized for her outstanding teaching and mentorship, Claudia Stokes has been named the 2018 recipient of the Dr. and Mrs. Z.T. Scott Faculty Fellowship, the most prestigious faculty award the University bestows.

from left to right Kimberley Phillips, Jennifer Henderson, Erin Sumner, Nirav Mehta, and Diane Saphire

DICKE PROFESSOR IN PUBLIC HUMANITIES Michael Fischer Professor of English Trinity University has appointed Michael Fischer, English professor and former vice president for Academic Affairs, as the inaugural Janet S. Dicke Professor in Public Humanities. The professorship focuses on raising the visibility of humanities at Trinity and in the community.

Known as an authority on modern literary criticism, Fischer’s research and teaching interests focus on English Romanticism, the history of ideas about literature and philosophy, and defenses of the humanities. In this new role, Fischer will direct activities that bring the humanities to a broad and general public, and he will serve as an advocate for the importance of the humanities in everyday life.

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TRINITY FACULTY AWARDED FOR EXCELLENCE Psychology professor Kimberley Phillips was recognized for outstanding scholarship, research, or creative work.

Jennifer Henderson, professor and chair of communication, was lauded for her commitment and dedication to student advising.

Diane Saphire, associate vice president for Institutional Research and Effectiveness, received an award for distinguished professional, community, and University service.

Two early career faculty members—assistant professors Nirav Mehta, physics and astronomy, and Erin Sumner, human communication and theatre—were cited for distinguished teaching and research.

Achievement / FACULTY RECOGNITION

EXEMPLARY LEADERSHIP Trinity’s ranks of strong, forward-thinking leaders have swelled with the addition of executive staff. Join us in welcoming new and familiar faces to these roles.

INAUGURAL AWARD RECOGNIZES STUDENT ADVOCACY The President’s Award for Excellence in Student Advocacy, given by Trinity President Danny Anderson, recognizes faculty and staff who “quietly and selflessly share their heart, time, talent, and treasure” with students.

Michele Johnson, biology professor, was recognized for her close work with 38 undergraduate students in her research lab. Together, they have produced more than 100 conference presentations and 17 publications. Additionally, she travels with students around the world, supports first-generation and underrepresented students vehemently, and works to make the largest class on campus, “Integrative Biology,” feel like a meaningful learning community.

Jeremy Boyce ’03, coordinator of athletic recruitment and student success in the Office of Admissions, received the award for guiding countless prospective students, particularly student-athletes and underrepresented students, through the admissions process and their time at Trinity. He teaches in the “Academic Success Program” class and mentors football players and students in the Men’s Project.

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Tess Coody-Anders ’93 / Vice President for Strategic Communications and Marketing

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Jim Bradley / Chief Information Officer for Information Technology Services

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David Ribble ’82 / Assistant Vice President for Academic Affairs for Budget and Research

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Michelle Bartonico ’08 / Assistant Vice President for Strategic Communications and Marketing

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Joannah Stone Pickett / Assistant Vice President for Alumni Relations and Development

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Robert F. “Bob” Scherer / Dean of the School of Business

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Deli Yang / Associate Dean of the School of Business, Burr-Clark Professor of International Business

DENEESE JONES ENTERS EDUCATION HALL OF FAME Trinity University Vice President of Academic Affairs Deneese Jones was inducted into the 2018 Educators’ Hall of Fame in April. The honor was bestowed by the Gamma Tau Chapter of the Phi Delta Kappa national educational sorority. The local chapter’s Hall of Fame spotlights and recognizes outstanding educators in the San Antonio area. Jones was selected in recognition of her hard work and dedication. “I am humbled and honored to be recognized for doing the work that I love,” Jones says.

“My service as an educator is grounded in my belief that a true education is the great equalizer in a nation of inequities.”

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In August 2018, Trinity’s choir headlined the prestigious international Classical Musical Festival in Austria, singing alongside musicians from 26 countries. Gary Seighman prepared the choir, while David Heller, Joseph Kneer, and Carolyn True performed in the concert on various instruments and Jacquelyn Matava soloed as a vocalist.

In 2006, computer science professor Mark Lewis ’96 noticed a disturbing trend.

“Flipped” classrooms energize students and professors across disciplines words by Jeremy Gerlach photos by Anh-Viet Dinh ’15

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“Students in my upperdivision classes weren’t retaining nearly as much from their lower level courses as I thought they should have been,” Lewis says, grimacing wryly. “Which was depressing, because I was the one teaching their lower-level courses.”

What had gone wrong?

What wasn’t sticking? 

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Mark Lewis '96 assists a computer science student during a hands-on lesson in class. Lewis uses the flipped classroom model to encourage more engagement with coding and programming during classroom hours.

“I needed a way for them to be doing more: applying what they were learning,” Lewis explains. “I needed my students to spend more class time programming, engaging with the language that is computer code, and less time listening to me talk.”

So, Lewis became one of many Trinity faculty to “flip” his classroom. No more 50-minute lectures, coupled with post-class homework. Instead, Lewis started filming small, condensed lectures— imagine miniature TED Talks—for his students to absorb before class, so they could spend class time on interactive, engaging activities.

Problem solved?

“The first few classes I tried to flip, it was an abysmal failure,” Lewis says. “For the flipped model to work, your students have to commit to spending time learning outside of class, and not everyone was watching the material.”

But with a few tweaks, lessons learned, and best practices applied, Lewis eventually cracked the code for the ideal flipped classroom. Now, before a semester starts, Lewis films about 2530 instructional lectures, typically less than 10 minutes long, for his students to watch in lieu of

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a textbook reading assignment. Before each class, students are digitally quizzed on the material to hold them accountable. In class, pupils are given a chance to ask questions, then the group launches into actual coding.

“I do feel, with students that have had a flipped classroom, if you see them three or four semesters later, they’re now having that better retention,” Lewis says. “That helps me, that helps other professors, it helps everyone when students can jump right into new material.”

It’s a model that several other Trinity faculty have reached, either independently or through collaboration, says classical studies professor Thomas Jenkins. Jenkins also serves as director of the Collaborative of Learning and Teaching, Trinity’s center dedicated to the intersection of pedagogy, technology, and professional development.

Through the Collaborative, Jenkins has worked with professors to flip classrooms across campus. This is a “nationwide and even globalwide impulse,” Jenkins says, where schools are moving away from a model of “75-minute lectures in class plus homework outside of it,” and towards disseminating smaller, “chunked

amounts” of material online, and spending class time in “more engaging activities.”

“There’s a magical moment when 25 people in a classroom don’t have to concentrate all their attention on the one person at the head of the class,” Jenkins says. “The flipped classroom is one that hits the ground running. You’ve already pondered the material before coming to class, so now it’s already germinating; it’s already in your mind. Now, you can engage with your classmates and your professor.”

But flipping takes time, Jenkins cautions. The professor needs to present the content effectively, through online-focused content, and that means hours upon hours of creating and filming this material either in a specialized studio at Trinity’s Coates Library or by using mobile recording equipment from the comfort of their own office.

To support this initiative, Jenkins says Trinity has a number of development grants, as well as institutional support and best-practices advice for professors eager to give this technique a try.

Ultimately, he notes, the flipping process represents an investment in the entire student body.

just talking all the time, and the students can get involved and share whether they understand the concept or not.”

Nguyen also emphasizes the power of group work in a flipped classroom. In her mathematical modeling course, her students go off-template, working together to build and understand computer code from the very beginning of the coding process.

Since this is happening in class, right in front of her, Nguyen’s role shifts from lecturer to tutor, which means more opportunities for hands-on instruction. And with that, she says, can come some additional work for faculty.

“There’s a lot of unpredictable factors to teaching this way,” Nguyen says. “In the traditional method, you teach through a lecture, you take notes, and that’s it, right? Hardly anyone asks questions. But now anything can come up: if someone’s code isn’t working, I have to sit down with them to see what happened. It may be a small issue, it may be something harder to debug, or even something I’ve never encountered before.

It can be tricky.”

“The flipped classroom is one that hits the ground running.

You’ve already pondered the material before coming to class, so now it’s already germinating; it’s already in your mind.

Now, you can engage with your classmates and your professor.”

“This is the power of the flipped classroom,” Jenkins says. “If you do it right, it creates a ‘scaffold’ on which students can climb their way to the top of the material, before they even get to class. And this makes the class time more energetic, more interactive, and ultimately more successful for student learning.”

Mathematics professor Hoa Nguyen can speak to this increase in energy firsthand.

“If my class just sits there for 75 minutes and takes notes, some of the students will fall asleep, some of them will just listen through one ear and the material goes out the other—they forget everything,” Nguyen says. “But when you make class more interactive, students who were just passively sitting there, listening to my lecture, now they’re more prepared. Part of that is because they have a quiz. Now, they’ve come to class having watched an outside video, so I can ask relevant questions to that material. So I’m not

Thomas Jenkins leads a discussion among faculty in the Collaborative.

"It’s good for students to see that solving a practical problem is not an easy thing to do."

Hoa Nguyen (center) works with students during a math modeling course. Nguyen designed this course specifically to focus on group work during class time, where students work together to learn and develop mathematical computer code.

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But Trinity hangs its hat on being a safe place for students to fail. For professors like Nguyen, this type of failure can be a powerful teaching tool. “I think it’s better this way—I can walk around to the students that may have an issue, so we can debug together,” Nguyen explains.

“But it’s good for students to see that solving a practical problem is not an easy thing to do. This struggle, that’s good. It works for me.”

While flipped classrooms are working wonders for STEM fields like math and computer science, religion professor Randall Nadeau says the flipped method has a special place with the humanities, too. “‘Flipping’ has always been the vision of the ‘ideal’ humanities classroom,” Nadeau says. “Our students aren’t just listening and reading—they’re speaking, writing, sharing the knowledge they’ve gained. They are learning right in front of you.”

Nadeau implemented this practice into his “Introduction to Asian Religions” course three years ago. This is Nadeau’s “staple” course, and one he’s taught every semester he’s been at Trinity for the past 25 years. Nadeau says he’s always searched for ways to continue tweaking and adjusting how his students absorb the material.

In the past, Nadeau would spend his 50 minute class with a 40-minute lecture, with time built in for students to ask questions, but still “very much focused on me talking” to the classroom, he says. But now, Nadeau condenses his 40-minute lecture into a series of short videos and PowerPoint recordings, all spread out over 30 class periods, which students are responsible for watching before class. To hold students accountable, Nadeau also holds short, five-minute quizzes on the material at the beginning of class, similar to Lewis and Nguyen.

“This was a big change for me, but it’s definitely worth the tradeoff,” Nadeau says. “Students are now coming to class having already seen and heard what I used to do in the lecture, so I can do a lot more in class with discussion and interactive exercises.”

These exercises include surveys, questionnaires, short texts, small group discussion on controversial questions, and other interactive material that students can react to in real-time.

And while this technique might also work on a classroom scaled to the hundreds at a mammoth state university, Nadeau poses, Trinity’s intimate setting—and 9:1 student-faculty ratio—provides one key advantage.

“I have my groups of four-to-five students actually report back to the whole class,” Nadeau says. “This is possible with 10, 15, even 30 students, but it might not translate to a class of 200. And at Trinity, you’re not getting a class with more than 30 students, so we can do this kind of thing more effectively.”

And several pedagogical studies he’s read the past few years, Nadeau notes, have linked this type of group engagement to higher knowledge retention.

“Having that base of knowledge before starting discussion is really what drives the quality of discussion,” Nadeau says. “And if I’ve learned anything about education over the last several years, it’s that the more things students can do actively, the more they will learn.”

Despite these glowing reviews of the flipped model thus far, Lewis will admit that the method might not be for every classroom, professor, or student. The true irony, Lewis explains, is that when he himself was an undergrad, he would have hated the flipped classroom.

“I wanted everything spoon fed to me through a lecture and through the textbook,” Lewis laughs. “So I’m quite certain ‘me as a student’ would have hated ‘me as a professor.’”

But Lewis also cautions that higher education is changing, especially for fields such as computer science. “Computers are taking over the world,” he notes, and new classroom material created by constantly-changing technology can be overwhelming for a conventional curriculum to encompass entirely.

“So what I’d say to ‘Mark Lewis, student’ is that our degree, today, is not the same as it was when I graduated. Computers do so much more.

So we have to prepare our students for things that I couldn’t even have imagined being relevant back when I graduated,” Lewis says. “And our department can’t just keep adding courses. We have to work to make our classes more effective, and that’s where the flipped model has the most impact.”

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Coleen Grissom emceed “An Evening with Margaret Atwood,” where she held a dialogue with the world-renowned novelist and author of The Handmaid’s Tale. The event took place at Trinity in March 2018 as part of Gemini Ink’s Autograph Series and in partnership with Trinity University Press.

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. Our faculty both 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 con-

MARGUERITE AVERY / Library

NORMA E. CANTÚ / Modern

tributed an essay-review of The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964 for Resources for American Literary Study in 2017, Vol. 39. She also contributed an essay-review of Present Past for Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 2018, Vol. 14, Issue 2. In October 2017, Aarons gave the invited keynote address “Eduardo Halfon and the Inheritance of Memory” at Loyola Marymount University’s Annual Fischmann Family Distinguished Lecture in Los Angeles.

served as an invited guest editor for the “Special Issue on Open Access” in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 2017, Vol. 49, Issue 1.

Languages and Literatures received a grant from Humanities Texas, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, to support her project, “From Novel to Play: Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima.” The work was included in a symposium on Bless Me, Ultima hosted by Trinity University in San Antonio in February 2018. Cantú also served as editor for the special issue “30 years of Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza” for Camino Real, 2018, Vol. 10, Issue 13.

Additionally, Cantú served as a guest co-editor for the special issue “Latinx Civil Rights and Beyond” for American Studies, 2017, Vol. 56, Issue 2, to which she also contributed the poem “Still.”

Cantú and C. Rodríguez* published “Breaking Open Gates: A Conversation with Emmy Pérez” in World Literature Today in 2018. Cantú also published various poems: “Mujeres de Juarez,” “Border Bullets,” and “My Mother’s Hands” in Southwestern American Literature, 2018, Vol. 43, Issue 2; “Death Expects” in Pilgrimage, 2018, Vol. 41, Issue 1; and “Meditación Fronteriza, I, II, & III” in The Acentos Review in 2017. In September 2017, Cantú presented “Growing up Chicana in South Texas” at Southwestern University’s second annual Borderlands Symposium on Contemporary Borderlands Culture and Literature in Georgetown,

DANIA ABREU-TORRES / Modern Languages and Literatures published “The Gangster and the Geek: Diasporic Masculinities in Piri Thomas and Junot Díaz” in the International Journal of Africana Studies, 2018, Vol. 18, Issue 2. She also serves as chapter adviser for Trinity’s chapter of The National Society of Collegiate Scholars, which was designated a Bronze Star Chapter for the 2017-18 year in May 2018.

LAURA AGOSTON / Art and Art History contributed “Allegories of Inclination and Imitation at the Casa Buonarroti” for Artemisia Gentileschi in a Changing Light with Brepols Publishers in 2017.

PETER BALBERT / English presented “Catalytic London and the Voluptuous Suffocation: Nightmare and Sexual Revenge in ‘The Border-Line’” at the 14th International D.H. Lawrence Conference in London, England, in July 2017.

DOUGLAS BRINE / Art and Art History presented “Tournai’s wall memorials and early Netherlandish art” for Rice University’s Art History Department in Houston in November 2017. He also presented “Musicians and their monuments in the Burgundian Netherlands” at the Renaissance Society of America Annual Conference in New Orleans in March 2018, and “‘Beautiful authorities’: Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin and early Netherlandish painting” at the Historians of Netherlandish Art Conference in Ghent, Belgium, in May 2018.

DAMIAN CALUORI / Philosophy contributed “Francisco Sanchez: A Renaissance Pyrrhonist against Aristotelian Dogmatism” for Skepticism: From Antiquity to the Present with Bloomsbury in 2018.

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

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Works / ARTS and HUMANITIES

Texas. She also presented “Translating Gloria Anzaldúa” at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers conference on “Border Crossings: Translation, Migration, and Gender in the Americas, the Transatlantic, and the Transpacific” in Bordeaux, France, in July 2017. In 2017, Cantú received two awards: the 14th Annual Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/ Latino Literature, and the Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award from the American Folklore Society.

MARK GARRISON / Art and Art

DAVID HELLER / Music was a

History published The Ritual Landscape at Persepolis: Glyptic Imagery From the Persepolis Fortification and Treasury Archives with the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago in 2017.

featured performer and lecturer at the 42nd Annual Classical Music Festival Summer Academy in Eisenstadt, Austria, in August 2017.

BEATRICE CARAWAY / Library

KYLE GILLETTE / Human Com-

received a regional award from the EPA for her green infrastructure project that contributed to the Olmos Park Terrace Community Garden in San Antonio.

munication and Theatre played Hamlet and Mark Anthony in a production of Shakespeare’s Island at the Festival Laboratorio Interculturale di Pratiche in Fara Sabina, Italy, in 2017. Additionally, Gillette was the voice of the chief for the Sword of Kunágota with support from the Hungarian National Museum of Budapest in Budapest, Hungary, in 2018.

KELLY GREY CARLISLE / English published We Are All Shipwrecks: A Memoir with Sourcebooks in 2017 and toured to promote the book that same year.

ERWIN COOK / Classical Studies was elected a lifetime member of the Fondazione Lorenzo Valla.

RUBÉN DUPERTUIS / Religion co-edited Reading and Teaching Ancient Fiction: Jewish, Christian, and Greco-Roman Narratives (Writings from the Greco-Roman World Supplement 10) with SBL Press in 2018.

MICHAEL FISCHER / English published “Literature and Empathy” in Philosophy and Literature, 2017, Vol. 41, Issue 2.

ALEX GALLIN-PARISI / Library published “It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint, and Other Lessons for Supporting Librarianship and Motherhood” in Library Leadership & Management, 2017, Vol. 31, Issue 4.

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LANETTE GARZA / Library published “The E-Resources Playbook: A Guide for Establishing Routine Assessment of E-Resources” for Technical Services Quarterly, 2017, Vol. 34, Issue 3.

COLEEN GRISSOM / English emceed “An Evening with Margaret Atwood,” where she held a dialogue with the world-renowned novelist and author of The Handmaid’s Tale. The event took place at Trinity in March 2018 as part of Gemini Ink’s Autograph Series and in partnership with Trinity University Press. In 2017, Grissom was awarded an endowed presidential scholarship in her name at the University of Texas Health Science Center in response to her 26 years of hosting the Book & Author Luncheon, which raised millions of dollars over the years for cancer research. In 2018, she led a discussion on Imagine Me Gone for a fundraiser with Mission Road Ministries in San Antonio. Also in 2018, Grissom presented a series of short stories at the “Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity” for the McNay Museum ArtFULL Wednesdays in San Antonio.

COLLEEN HOELSCHER / Library published “IMSLP/Petrucci Music Library” in Reference Reviews, 2017, Vol. 31, Issue 7. With a colleague, Hoelscher also published “Rethinking Special Collections Moves as Opportunities, not Obstacles” in RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage, 2017, Vol. 18, Issue 2.

MICHAEL HUGHES ’05 / Library published “What motivates the authors of video game walkthroughs and FAQs? A study of six GameFAQs contributors” in First Monday, 2018, Vol. 23, Issue 1. Hughes also published “Fetch Quest: A Select Bibliography of Game Studies Journals” for The Serials Librarian, 2017, Vol. 73, Issue 3-4. In 2018, he was awarded a research fellowship at The Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, N.Y.

JASON JOHNSON / History and colleagues published Ruptures of the Everyday: Views of Modern Germany from the Ground with Berghahn Books in 2017. Johnson also published “Wild and Fearsome Hours: The First Year of the US Occupation of a Bavarian County, 1945-1946” in the German Studies Review, 2018, Vol. 41, Issue 1. Additionally, he published Divided Village: The Cold War in the German Borderlands with Routledge in 2017. Johnson gave the invited lecture “‘Stumbling’ Toward Memorialization: Germany and the Victims of the Holocaust” at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Ky., in October 2017. In November 2017, he presented the invited lecture “The Iron Curtain through a German Village” at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pa.

Works / ARTS and HUMANITIES

Jacob Tingle ’95 teaches a First-Year Experience course during the fall semester.

STATE OF THE ARTS ALE program expands with generous USAA grant

By Jeremy Gerlach

Trinity’s Arts, Letters, and Enterprise (ALE) program will now be able to offer students paid internships during the academic year, thanks to a generous grant from USAA. ALE is Trinity’s one-of-a-kind approach to merging the liberal arts with the business world, and already offers students fully-paid summer positions in nonprofits and businesses of all stripes. In 2018, ALE summer interns partnered with 21 nonprofits, ranging from arts enterprises such as the San Antonio Symphony to political offices such as Sen. John Cornyn ’73 (R-TX) and Texas state Rep. Diego Bernal (D).

These internships help students realize the realworld ways that a liberal arts curriculum can give them a competitive professional edge in the business world.

Trinity music professor Carl Leafstedt, who cochairs the ALE program, says the USAA grant will support at least 10 students interested in pursuing paid internships during the spring 2019 semester.

These internships will include individual stipends for each student.

“These internships take our students to fields that span across the curriculum, across the city, and that’s a type of community engagement that’s important to USAA, too,” Leafstedt says. “As a donor, USAA is a perfect match for us.”

Thanks to the USAA funding and strong institutional support, ALE has grown from four, 12, 15, then 21 interns these past four years. Student interest, Leafstedt

notes, is “huge for what we’re able to offer,” with more than 120 applications for the 21 ALE internships in 2018.

“The program is growing by leaps and bounds, to the point where we’re scrambling to keep up with student interest,” Leafstedt says. “We’re working very hard with President Anderson, with our Board of Trustees, to continue to make ALE an important part of Trinity’s distinctive identity going forward.”

And as instrumental as faculty, leadership, and donors have been for the program, Jacob Tingle ’95, director for experiential learning, says alumni will play just as powerful a role in expanding ALE’s geographic footprint, too.

“We’re aiming to leverage more alumni connections to launch pilot ALE summer internship positions in other major metros,” Tingle says. “In the future, out-of-state Trinity students could even land full-time, resume-worthy summer jobs right in their own hometowns.”

For Megan Smith ’18, an environmental science major and communication minor, an ALE internship with Green Spaces Alliance (GSA) of South Texas was an enormous resume-booster. GSA is a local nonprofit dedicated to urban nature conservancy.

“With an ALE internship, you’re taking your education and going out into the workforce and doing something real with it while you’re an undergraduate,” Smith says. “I love being able to see results that don’t just take the form of a piece of paper. Being outside and seeing the effect of your work—that’s such a different experience.”

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Works / ARTS and HUMANITIES

RACHEL JOSEPH / Human Com-

Brandon Guzman ’19 and Mary Margaret Herring ’20, guided by communications professors Jennifer Henderson and Aaron Delwiche, explore the ramifications of “fake news” as part of a Mellon research project in Summer 2018.

INSPIRING INITIATIVE

ANDREW KANIA / Philosophy

Arts and humanities undergraduate research gets major boost

contributed “Music and Time” for The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Temporal Experience with Routledge in 2017; and “Why Gamers Are Not Narrators” for The Aesthetics of Videogames with Routledge in 2018. He also contributed a review of Groove: A Phenomenology of Rhythmic Nuance for The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 2017, Vol. 51, Issue 1. Additionally, Kania wrote “Why Gamers Are Not Performers” in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2018, Vol. 76, Issue 2. In 2017, he directed a local vocal ensemble that performed seven of his original musical arrangements in Auckland, New Zealand.

Since 2012, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has supported collaborative undergraduate research opportunities for students and faculty in arts and humanities at Trinity. In spring 2018, the Foundation awarded Trinity $800,000—its second five-year grant.

The grant will assist Trinity’s plan to integrate undergraduate research in the arts and humanities more fully into its curriculum and at earlier stages in students’ academic careers. The program funding will also allow the University to expand the number and diversity of students participating in these high-impact experiences.

Previous Mellon Foundation funding allowed the University to take initial steps to develop undergraduate research in the arts and humanities and create the Trinity Mellon Initiative. With this new grant, an expansion of the Mellon Initiative at Trinity will help the University increase access for underrepresented students who may not be aware of the opportunities and benefits of such research.

Chad Spigel, religion professor and director for the Mellon Initiative, says, “Our goal is to create and sustain an inclusive and diverse culture of research in the arts and humanities at Trinity.”

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munication and Theatre contributed “I’ll See You in the Trees: Trauma, intermediality and the Pacific Northwest weird” for Approaching Twin Peaks: Critical Essays on the Original Series with McFarland in 2017. She also wrote “Dorothy’s Window” for The Dime Show Review, 2017, Vol. 2, Issue 3. In 2018, Joseph published “And This Before Leaving” in The Coachella Review and “Oh, Wondrous Day” in The Brooklyn Review. In 2017, she was a finalist for the 2017 Eludia Award for her short stories and the 2017 Black Lawrence Press Hudson Prize for “Dorothy’s Window and Other Stories.” Also in 2017, Joseph was a shortlist finalist for the 2017 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Novella Competition for The Man in the Trees.

IMPACT 2017-2018

LAWRENCE KIM / Classical Studies c ontributed “Atticism and Asianism” for The Oxford Handbook to the Second Sophistic with Oxford University Press in 2017.

CAREY LATIMORE / History presented “Eatonville and Beyond: Historic African American Townships” at Zora Week in San Antonio in 2017.

Works / ARTS and HUMANITIES

CHIA-WEI LEE / Music , Gary Seighman / Music, E. Lucero*, O. Torres*, J. Maislin*, A. Chin*, M. Vaughn*, G. Gaedke*, J. Koeller*, and H. Wilkins* performed at the Sichuan Vocational College of Culture and Communication and the Nanchong Vocational and Technical College in Central China in March 2018.

DAVID LESCH / History , with an introduction from Ron Nirenberg ’99, the mayor of San Antonio, presented “Bashar al-Assad and the Destruction and Reconstruction of Syria” in coordination with the World Affairs Council as part of the Distinguished Speakers Series in San Antonio in November 2017.

STEVEN LUPER / Philosophy was invited to contribute “Philosophical perspectives” for The Routledge Companion to Death and Dying with Routledge in 2018.

NICOLE MARAFIOTI / History was honored with the Best Article Prize by the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists for “Seeking Alfred’s Body: Royal Tomb as Political Object in the Reign of Edward the Elder” at the Society’s Eighteenth Biennial Meeting in Honolulu in August 2017.

ANA MARIA MUTIS / Modern Languages and Literatures published “El abrazo de la serpiente o la re-escritura del Amazonas dentro de una ética ecológica y poscolonial” in the Hispanic Research Journal, 2018, Vol. 19, Issue 1.

RANDALL NADEAU / Religion gave the keynote “Visualizing the Pure Land: Images and Imagination in Buddhist Practice” at the San Antonio Museum of Art in June 2017. The lecture marked the opening of the museum’s “Heaven and Hell: Salvation and Retribution in Pure Land Buddhism” exhibition. In April 2018, Nadeau spoke on

a panel at the Fulbright Seminar in San Antonio.

War and Peace Academic Conference in Philadelphia in April 2018.

DEBRA OCHOA / Modern Languag-

MICHAEL SCHREYACH / Art

es and Literatures co-edited Gender in Spanish Urban Spaces: Literary and Visual Narratives of the New Millennium with Palgrave Macmillan in 2017. This edited collection examines the synergistic relationship between gender and urban space in post-millennium Spain.

Ochoa also published “Female subjects in Carmen Martín Gaite’s New York texts” for the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 2017, Vol. 18, Issue 3.

and Art History published Pollock’s Modernism with Yale University Press in 2017. Also in 2017, he published “The Crisis of Jackson Pollock’s Mural as a Painting” in a special supplemental issue of the Getty Research Journal, 2017, Vol. 9. Additionally, he released History and Desire: A Short Introduction to the Art of Cy Twombly as an open access publication hosted on the Trinity Digital Commons in 2017.

Schreyach contributed “Meeting Spaces” to the catalogue Mark Schlesinger: Hello Stranger(s) with Ruiz-Healy Art in 2018.

KATHRYN O’ROURKE / Art and Art History was honored with the 2018 Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians for Modern Architecture in Mexico City: History, Representation, and the Shaping of a Capital in 2018.

CORINNE PACHE / Classical Studies published “‘A word from another world’: mourning and similes in Homeric epic and Alice Oswald’s Memorial” in the Classical Receptions Journal, 2018, Vol. 10, Issue 2.

DAVID RANDO / English was an invited participant for the “Innovative Information and Communication Technological Platforms for Intercultural Studies” roundtable at Intercultural Studies for a Global Age: Principles, Methodology, Practice, an international symposium in Athens, Ga., in April 2018. His presentation focused on his paper “I am Rebuilding My Music Library. Yes, I Am; The Technological Wish Image and Intercultural Studies.”

LINDA SALVUCCI / History and Richard Salvucci / Economics co-presented “Coffee, Competition, and Hurricanes: Causality and the Timing of Economic Change in Mid-Nineteenth Century Cuba” at the Cuba in

GARY SEIGHMAN / Music co-composed “Here Lie Native Lands Below the Cosmos,” which Trinity University Choir members performed at the College Music Society National Conference in San Antonio in October 2017. Also in 2017, Gary Seighman directed the Trinity University Chamber Singers at the National Collegiate Choral Organization National Conference in Baton Rouge, La. In May 2018, Seighman and members of Trinity University’s Men’s Choir performed “Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl in Concert” for the San Antonio Symphony POPS series at the Majestic Theatre.

MICHAEL SOTO / English was recognized by the CHOICE editorial board of the Association of College and Research Libraries for his book, Measuring the Harlem Renaissance, which was selected as an “Outstanding Academic Title” in 2017. He also participated in the “Reviving Zora/ Defining Janie” panel at Zora Week in San Antonio in 2017.

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Works / ARTS & HUMANITIES

HANDS-ON HARMONY At prestigious Austrian festival, Trinity music faculty shine alongside students

By Jeremy Gerlach

As Trinity music professor David Heller’s fingers float over a 300-yearold organ keyboard, they trace the same exact keys that Beethoven and Haydn’s hands once graced.

That’s life in Eisenstadt, Austria, where titans of classical music wrote and premiered their works centuries ago. History and harmony seemingly echo from every corner of each hallowed cathedral, palace, and performance hall, including the Bergkirche, home to that original pipe organ used in multiple music premieres by Beethoven and Haydn.

But that’s also life at Trinity, where “hands-on” faculty like Heller regularly open doors to the past. In August 2018, Heller and a group of music professors led 40 Trinity choir members to headline the prestigious international Classical Musical Festival in Austria.

For Heller, now in his 32nd year at Trinity, the Austria trip was a beautiful example of how Trinity harmonizes with the outside world. “Hearing everything going on around me—all of these musicians from 26 countries—for our students to be part of that musical expression, creating a choral work, it made my heart swell,” Heller says. “It’s an experience they will never forget for the rest of their lives.”

At the festival, elite musicians from around the world gathered to perform classics such as Haydn’s “The Creation” and Beethoven’s “Mass in C Major.” The festival, now in its 43rd year, is set across a dramatic set of venues, ranging from the iconic Haydnsaal and modern performing arts center the Kulturzentrum, to towering, ancient churches and chapels such as the Mattersburg Pfarrkirche, St. Stephen’s Cathedral, and the Bergkirche.

Even among these staggering set-

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Works / ARTS and HUMANITIES

tings and professional musicians, Trinity’s choir wasn’t drowned out, says Gary Seighman, music professor and director of Trinity’s choral program. “We’ve been singing with the San Antonio Symphony for the past seven years,” Seighman says. “That’s why we keep getting invited to these kinds of things: We perform next to professionals, and that professionalism shows.”

Having faculty as experts in their field is one thing. But at Trinity, having faculty who are willing to provide their expertise in the field can be a game changer.

Alongside Heller, a talented organist and keyboardist with a staggering breadth of knowledge on baroque and classical-era instruments, professor and skilled pianist Carolyn True assisted with accompaniment and noted she “wore several hats during rehearsal” in Austria. Joseph Kneer, conductor of Trinity’s symphony, performed adroitly on violin, while mezzo-soprano Jacquelyn Matava dazzled as a soloist during Beethoven’s “Mass in C Major.” And Seighman, a smooth tenor vocalist and acclaimed conductor, helped mold the Trinity choir’s sound into a force worthy of even Beethoven or Haydn’s masterpieces.

True says the trip was a textbook example of experiential learning. “There are some things you can read about in books,” she says. “But it’s not being here, being immersed in the culture, having rehearsals in the same place where Haydn conducted, the same instruments they used. To be able to see that and experience that, we’ll all come back changed.”

BENJAMIN ELDON STEVENS /

CURTIS SWOPE / Modern Languag-

Classical Studies was invited to publish “Classical Desires in Call Me by Your Name (dir. Luca Guadagnino 2017)” in Antiquipop in 2018.

es and Literatures published Building Socialism: Architecture and Urbanism in East German Literature, 1955-1973 with Bloomsbury in 2018. The book is part of Bloomsbury’s “New Directions in German Studies” series. Also in 2018, Swope contributed “Modernity and the City in Christa Wolf’s Oeuvre of the 1960s” for Christa Wolf: A Companion with De Gruyter.

CLAUDIA STOKES / English published “Novel Commonplaces: Quotation, Epigraphs, and Literary Authority” in American Literary History, 2018, Vol. 30, Issue 2. She also contributed “Hymns by the Fireside: Religious Verse and the Rise and Fall of the Fireside Poets” for Above the American Renaissance with the University of Massachusetts Press in 2018.

In November 2017, Stokes presented “Novel Commonplaces: or, Why DO Nineteenth-Century American Writers Quote So Much?” at the Inaugural Humanities Texas Speakers Series and C19 Circuit Event in Corpus Christi, Texas.

HEATHER SULLIVAN / Modern Languages and Literatures contributed “Goethe’s Concept of Nature: Proto-ecological Model” for Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture with Lexington Books in 2017.

She also published the invited essay “Goethe’s Colors: Revolutionary Optics and the Anthropocene” in Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2017, Vol. 51, Issue 1. In 2017, Sullivan co-authored “Hybrid Environments in the Anthropocene: Recent Fiction” for Readings in the Anthropocene: The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond with Bloomsbury. She also published a review of Umwelt-engagierte Literatur aus Island und Norwegen: Ein interdisziplinärer Beitrag zu den Environmental Humanities in Ecozon@, 2017, Vol. 8, Issue 2. In November 2017, Sullivan was invited to participate in the presidential forum on “Reorientations around Goethe” at the Atkins Conference of the North American Goethe Society in State College, Pa. She also gave one invited lecture and three conference presentations.

ANGELA TARANGO / Religion contributed “Hunting Buffalo in Oklahoma: Native American Casinos, Constructed Identities and Portrayals of Native Culture and Religion” for The Business Turn In American Religious History with Oxford University Press in 2017. Tarango also contributed “Native American Religions in the Twentieth Century” for The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History with Oxford University Press in 2018. Additionally, Tarango was an invited speaker at two conferences: the Religion and the American Normal Conference at Princeton University in Princeton, N.J., in February 2018; and the Religious Movements: Migration and Belief in the Americas conference at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va., in April 2018.

CARLOS X. ARDAVÍN TRABANCO / Modern Languages and Literatures co-edited Meditaciones orteguianas, a volume on Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, with Nexofía in 2018. Ardavín also published Poesía española en la transición, a monograph on Spanish poetry during the country’s transition to democracy, with Aula lírica in 2018.

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Shifting the Field Trinity team uses drones to 3D map fault lines, opening up new possibilities for earthquake research, groundwater resources, and oil exploration words by Jeremy Gerlach photos by Taylor Stakes

T

rinity geosciences professor Ben Surpless has always wanted to study fault lines from the top of a 200foot cliff. But he’s also held on tightly to another dream: not plunging to his death.

“People told me, ‘Oh, you should learn how to rappel,’” says Surpless of his geology exploits, “but in reality, one rope on the side of a cliff… that’s not an effective use of my time and energy, and I also don’t want to die.”

So, in July 2018, Surpless landed on a less precarious solution: using drones to produce 3D maps of a fault system. This innovative method is opening a door for faster and more efficient research on gas and oil recovery, groundwater flow, geothermal energy, and even earthquakes.

Surpless, along with geology majors Caroline McKeighan ’19 and Curtis Segarra ’19, spent the summer collecting field data by flying drones armed with high-tech cameras across a major fault zone in south central Utah.

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IMPACT 2017-2018

“With drones, you can get at data that you couldn’t possibly get at without that additional step [of climbing rocks],” Surpless says. “This is where a lot of geologists are looking, especially ones who rely on field data that’s difficult to collect.”

Scientists have studied faults—massive cracks in the earth caused by mass rock movement —for hundreds of years, but this work has typically involved hours upon hours of exhausting and sometimes-perilous field research. By using drones, Surpless says, scientists can cover much more territory.

During the group’s Utah trip—where desert temperatures among the alien-like, brightred rock formations soared above 105 degrees by day and down into the 40s at night—this research method allowed Surpless and his students to work smarter, not harder. 

Watch a video about the research at gotu.us/UtahTrip

The Trinity research team studied fault lines in vertical spaces by using drones to capture footage of geological formations.

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IMPACT 2017-2018

While the team hiked as much as four miles in a given day, this ground represented a tiny fraction of the total distance they covered with the drones.

Drones with stabilizing cameras flew over the Utah fault zone—which typically includes challenging topography ranging from hundred-foot cliffs and outcrops to deep ravines and gullies—taking 4K video of the geological formation from multiple angles.

Data from the research done by Surpless’ group, funded by the National Science Foundation and in partnership with the Keck Consortium and students from the College of Wooster (Charley Hankla) and Mount Holyoke College (Madison Woodley), will take time to process, but has already produced a groundbreaking new model for fault system mapping.

Surpless’ group has used a specialized software package, Agisoft PhotoScan Professional, to transform the footage into hundreds of photos with millions of specialized spatial points, creating a 3D mesh—or model—that can be laid out over a geographic area. When paired with real-world coordinates in ArcGIS software, this map can serve as a functional reference for geoscientists running numerical computer simulations of major fault systems.

“We’re not the first people to integrate Agisoft Photoscan with ArcGIS software,” Surpless says. “But I haven’t seen anyone else also run computer modeling of the system using two other pieces of software in order to better understand how fault lines evolve over time.”

With us so far? Here’s what this all means: Surpless’ two students have now been charged with turning the visual data from the drone footage into a model for predicting how fault lines will act, crack, and develop in the future.

McKeighan uses the drone videos, cut into thousands of individual still images, to build a massive digital model of the Utah cliffs, complete with fault zone cracks. Segarra then incorporates this data into a still-developing, mathematical computer model that can simulate how different types of ground layers react to a fault cutting into those layers. This theoretical—but data-driven—viewpoint helps provide a valuable predictive function.

“What’s neat is that once Curtis’ model becomes robust, we might be able to use his results to field test what Caroline has done,” Surpless explains.

In other words, Surpless’ team is building the framework for a program that can do more than look beneath the surface: it can predict the future of where valuable underground resources trapped in between massive geological formations will eventually settle.

Most of this type of “predictive geology” has previously been “horizontal,” or two-dimensional—“there’s a fault here and here on a map,” Surpless explains, pointing to two hypothetical cracks on an imaginary landscape, “but we haven’t been able to predict what’s happening here,” he continues, pointing beneath the map itself. Surpless’ research is digging deeper, exposing this third dimension.

“And that’s why we went to Utah, to a place where we have these spectacular, 200-meter cliffs that allow us to look and think vertically,” Surpless says.

“That’s what every journal, every publication is going to want to know: What’s at stake here? And in the end, it’s about resources,” he continues. “Whether it’s water, oil, natural gas, geothermal energy, all of these things flow as fluids through these fractures. And our project gets at the expected distribution of these resources—extrapolating what we can see on the surface to accurately predict what’s going on underneath.”

Beyond the flashy use of drones, this feat relies on a level of undergraduate involvement that’s just as innovative as the tech itself. But at Trinity, Surpless says, he has the time and resources to develop rock-solid relationships with his undergrads.

“I’ve had both Caroline and Curtis in class, so I know where their strengths are,” Surpless says. “I can design projects for them that will benefit my research, but also that will help them take advantage of their strengths.”

“I also know where their weaknesses are,” Surpless continues. “So I can make sure that’s where the greatest amount of their learning is going to be, where their curve is going to be the steepest. In the end, they cannot help but leave Trinity having learned a great deal.”

“And that’s why we went to Utah, to a place where we have these spectacular, 200-meter cliffs that allow us to look and think vertically.”

Both students will present their research from the Utah project at a conference in Portland, Oregon, at the end of the school year. Beyond that, Surpless says, he wouldn’t be surprised if rumblings of his team’s findings make it into national scientific publications.

“That’s something that happens at Trinity pretty commonly: an undergraduate paper or thesis becomes the seed for major, peer-reviewed publication,” Surpless explains.

“And perhaps even one that can shift the way research is done in an entire field.”

Jennifer Steele published papers with undergraduates in the Journal of Physical Chemistry and Plasmonics.

Works / SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, and MATHEMATICS

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.

E. CABRAL BALREIRA / Mathematics published “A Geometric Generalization of the Planar Gale-Nikaidô Theorem” for the Journal of Mathematics and Statistics in 2018. He was also invited to be an associate editor of Advances in Difference Equations.

Additionally, Balreira participated in the specialized training for expert witnesses at the Geometry of Redistricting summer school at Tufts University.

This training will allow Balreira to be an expert witness in situations where gerrymandering is suspected. In September 2017, Balreira led the “Soccer Analytics Workshop” at the Semana i at Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores in Monterrey, Mexico.

Balreira also gave four invited talks nationally and internationally.

CAROLYN BECKER / Psychology along with L. S. Kilpela ’04, K. Schaumberg ’07, and a colleague published “Mechanisms of action during a dissonance-based intervention through 14-month follow-up: The roles of body shame and body surveillance” in Body Image, 2017, Vol. 23. Becker and colleagues also published “Development and validation of makeup and sexualized clothing questionnaires” in the Journal of Eating Disorders, 2017, Vol. 5. In 2017, Becker and C. Verzijl ’14, Kilpela, S. Wilfred ’14, and other colleagues contributed “Body image in

adult women: Associations with health behaviors, quality of life, and functional impairment” for the Journal of Health Psychology. In addition, Becker along with Keesha Middlemass / Political Science, B. Taylor ’17, C. Johnson ’16, and F. Gomez* published “Food insecurity and eating disorder pathology” in the International Journal of Eating Disorders, 2017, Vol. 50, Issue 9. Becker also published “From Efficacy to Effectiveness to Broad Implementation: Evolution of the Body Project” in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 2017, Vol. 85, Issue 8. Along with T. Pollard ’15, Kilpela, and colleagues, Becker published “The Female Athlete Body (FAB) study: Rationale, design, and baseline characteristics” for Contemporary Clinical Trials, 2017, Vol. 60. She also published the comment “What promotes psychiatric intervention implementation?” in The Lancet Psychiatry, 2017, Vol. 4, Issue 11. Additionally, Becker co-published “What Promotes Psychiatric Intervention Implementation?” in Lancet Psychiatric, 2017, Vol. 4, Issue 11. In 2017, she co-contributed “The Use of Exposure-based Strategies in Treating Eating Disorders” for the Encyclopedia of Feeding and Eating Disorders with Springer Publishing Company. Also in 2017, Becker gave three invited keynote presentations, one of which was with Middlemass, and was honored with

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

Board Certification in Behavioral and Cognitive Psychology by the American Board of Professional Psychology. Additionally, Becker and her co-researchers were awarded a $3.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for their research on eating disorder prevention. Becker was selected to serve as president of the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology in 2019, serving as president-elect in 2018.

THE CHEMISTRY DEPARTMENT was awarded a grant from the Welch Foundation to promote chemistry research and more dynamic education.

KWAN CHENG / Physics and Astronomy and colleagues published “4,5-Dimethoxy-2-nitrobenzohydrazides and 1-(1-Benzylpiperidin-4-yl) ethan-1-ones as Potential Antioxidant/ Cholinergic Endowed Small Molecule Leads” in Scientia Pharmaceutica, 2018, Vol. 86, Issue 1.

JANE CHILDERS / Psychology along with A. Bottera ’15 and T. Howard ’15 contributed “Verbs: Learning how speakers use words to refer to actions” for Early Word Learning with Routledge in 2017. The book is part of the “Current Issues in Developmental Psychology” series. Childers along with Howard, B. Porter*,

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Works / SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, & MATHEMATICS

David Pooley teaches students in the Marrs McLean Observatory.

MAKING WAVES Physics and Astronomy professor leads study that may have helped discover smallest-ever black hole

When NASA scientists witnessed a massive merger of two neutron stars last fall, Trinity physics professor David Pooley saw the beginning of a new story.

Leading a study using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, Pooley and his fellow researchers soon discovered that this spectacular, stellar collision may have given birth to the lowest mass black hole ever discovered.

“While neutron stars and black holes are mysterious, we have studied many of them throughout the Universe using telescopes like Chandra,” says Pooley. “That means we have both data and theories on how we expect such objects to behave in X-rays.”

The new mass created by the collision - observed at 2.7 times the mass of Earth’s sun, is labeled as GW170817. The object still needs to be confirmed as a black hole, but that’s where most of the signs are pointing, according to a NASA release.

But while this potential black hole might physically be petit, the circumstances of its creation could be an enormous addition to the existing playbook for the creation of black holes.

All stars die when they run out of energy, but die in different ways depending on their size. Moderately-sized stars can simply collapse and become smaller white dwarves or neutron stars, but massive stars can suffer a gravitational collapse so colossal that the resulting hypernova explosion creates a black hole.

GW170817 is unique because it was created from two separate neutron stars, both exploding with range of each other’s gravitational waves and getting pulled together.

“GW170817 is the astronomical event that keeps on giving,” said J. Craig Wheeler, a co-author on the study from the University of Texas. “We are learning so much about the astrophysics of the densest known objects from this one event.”

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and S. Arriazola* presented “When comparing events in verb learning, children can ignore distractions” at the 4th Analogy conference in Paris in July 2017. Also in July 2017, at the International Association for the Study of Child Language in Lyon, France, Childers along with Howard and M. Dolan ’16 presented “Comparison can help children align elements of events, and subevents, when learning new verbs”; and Childers, Porter, T. Galvan ’11, C. Garcia*, and colleagues co-presented “Do patterns of noun and verb productions in the input influence Spanish and English-speaking children’s productive vocabularies?” At the Cognitive Development Society meeting in Portland, Ore., in October 2017, Childers, Porter, and S.K. Mrkonich* presented “Learning verbs across multiple examples separated by delays” and Childers, Porter, Arriazola, A. Sheppard ’17, and S. Lalani* presented “Do children attend to variation in elements across events during verb learning?”

CHRISTINA COOLEY / Chemistry was invited to present “Fluorogenic Polymerization Amplification as a New Platform for Disease Detection” for the Wenderfest Symposium in Stanford, Calif., in July 2017.

SABER ELAYDI / Mathematics , E. Cabral Balreira / Mathematics, and a colleague published “Global stability of higher dimensional monotone maps” in the Journal of Difference Equations and Applications, 2017, Vol. 23, Issue 12. Elaydi along with James Roberts / Biology, C. Phea ’17, Y. Samman*, R. Tchen ’17, and colleagues also published “Experimental Analysis of Interacting HT22 Plasma Membrane Cholesterol and β-Amyloid” in Advances in Alzheimer’s Disease, 2017, Vol. 6, Issue 4. Additionally, Elaydi, Eddy Kwessi / Mathematics, and a colleague published “Hierarchical competition models with the Allee

Works / SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, and MATHEMATICS

effect III: multispecies” for the Journal of Biological Dynamics, 2018, Vol. 12, Issue 1. Elaydi and colleagues also published “A discrete mathematical model for the aggregation of beta amyloid” in PLOS ONE in 2018. In 2017, Elaydi co-edited Advances in Difference Equations and Discrete Dynamical Systems: ICDEA, Osaka, Japan, July 2016 with Springer. He gave the keynote “Towards a theory of global dynamics in difference equations: Application to population dynamics” at the 23rd International Conference of Difference Equations and Applications in Timișoara, Romania, in July 2017.

WILLIAM ELLISON / Psychology published “Age Differences in the Desirability of Narcissism” in the Journal of Individual Differences, 2017, Vol. 38, Issue 4. Additionally, Ellison and colleagues received a grant from the Associated Colleges of the South to support a collaborative project, “Blended Inclusion: Innovative Pedagogy in Clinical Psychology Research Methods and Statistics for Diverse Students.”

ROBYN HODGKINS / Chemistry published “Physical and chemical properties of traditional and water-mixable oil paints assessed using single-sided NMR” in the Microchemical Journal, 2017, Vol. 133.

LAURA HUNSICKER-WANG / Chemistry co-contributed “Translation of Chemical Biology Research into the Biochemistry Laboratory: Chemical Modification of Proteins by Diethylpyrocarbonate” for ACS Symposium Series: Best Practices for Supporting and Expanding Undergraduate Research in Chemistry with the American Chemical Society in 2018.

MICHELE JOHNSON / Biology and C. Stehle ’13, A. Battles ’12, and M. Sparks ’11 published “Prey availability affects territory size, but not territorial display behavior, in green anole liz-

ards” in Acta Oecologica, 2017, Vol. 84.

Johnson and Jeremy Donald / Coates Library co-authored “HormoneBase, a population-level database of steroid hormone levels across vertebrates” for Scientific Data in 2018. Johnson and Brittney Ivanov / Biology co-published “Ecomorphological variation in three species of cybotoid anoles” for Herpetologica, 2018, Vol. 74. Johnson and D. Castro ’13 co-authored “The evolution of androgen receptor expression and behavior in Anolis lizard forelimb muscles” for the Journal of Comparative Psychology A, 2018, Vol. 204. Additionally, Johnson was awarded $13,177 for “Use it or lose it?

Behavioral and energetic influences on lizard tail anatomy” from the Texas Ecolab. In October 2017, Johnson gave five presentations at the 2017 Texas Herpetological Society Meeting in Bryan, Texas. In January 2018, she co-organized the “Illuminating the Evolution of Endocrine System Variation Through Large-Scale Comparative Analyses” symposium at the Society for Integrative & Comparative Biology 2018 Annual Meeting in San Francisco.

PETER KELLY-ZION / Engineering Science along with Christopher Pursell / Chemistry, G. Wassom*, B. Mandelkorn*, and C. Nkinthorn* published “Correlation for sessile drop evaporation over a wide range of drop volatilities, ambient gases and pressures” for the International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, 2018, Vol. 118.

EDDY KWESSI / Mathematics and colleagues published “Model averaging based on rank” for the Journal of Applied Statistics in 2017.

DANIEL LEHRMANN / Geoscienc-

Lehrmann and colleagues published “The influence of seawater carbonate chemistry, mineralogy, and diagenesis on calcium isotope variations in Lower-Middle Triassic carbonate rocks” in Chemical Geology, 2017, Vol. 471. Lehrmann co-wrote “Mechanical Stratigraphic and Tectonic Controls on Natural Fracturing in the Eagle Ford Formation, South-central and West Texas” for Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies Transactions, 2017, Vol. 471.

CORINA MAEDER ’99 / Chemistry published “Factors affecting the association of single- and double-stranded RNAs with montmorillonite nanoclays” in the International Journal of Biological Macromolecules, 2018, Vol. 109. Maeder, C. Schreib ’18, E. Bowman ‘16, C. Potts*, and colleagues co-published “Functional and Biochemical Characterization of Dib1’s Role in Splicing” in the Journal of Molecular Biology, Vol. 430, Issue 11.

KEVIN MCINTYRE / Psychology was awarded a grant from the Association for Psychological Science to support the creation of a new teaching website, Open Stats Lab, that uses open source data.

BRIAN MICELI / Mathematics along with J. Fidler ’08 and colleagues published “Shift equivalence in the generalized factor order” in Archiv der Mathematik, 2018, Vol.110, Issue 6. In July 2017, Miceli presented “Statistics on Set Partitions” at the 26th British Combinatorial Conference in Glasgow, Scotland. He also presented “Stirling Numbers & Euler’s Finite Difference Theorem” at the Permutation Patterns Conference at Reykjavík University in Reykjavík, Iceland, in June 2017.

es and colleagues published “Magmatic activities and their impacts on oil/gas formation in the southwestern Ordos Basin, Central China” in the Geological Journal in 2017. Additionally,

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Works / SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, and MATHEMATICS

DANY J. MUNOZ-PINTO / Engineering Science was awarded $150,000 by the Alzheimer’s Association for “Modelling inflammation in the context of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) using 3D microenvironments” in August 2017. Munoz-Pinto co-published “An improved correlation to predict molecular weight between crosslinks based on equilibrium degree of swelling of hydrogel networks” in the Journal of Biomedical Materials Research Part B Applied Biomaterials, 2018, Vol. 106, Issue 3. In March 2018, he gave an invited talk at the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Seminar at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas.

TROY MURPHY / Biology and P. Queller ’13 published “Seasonal variation in the utility of a status signaling system: Plumage ornament predicts foraging success only during periods of high competition” in PLOS ONE, 2017, Vol. 12, Issue 10.

PAUL MYERS / Computer Science served as a member of the Academic Alliance for the National Center for Women & Information Technology.

Myers has worked to support the organization’s mission to increase women’s meaningful participation in computing.

HOA NGUYEN / Mathematics received a $49,285 grant from the National Science Foundation to support her project, “RUI: Algorithms and Modeling for Chemotactic Deformable Particles in Non-Newtonian, Multiphase, Non-Isothermal, Turbulent Flows,” in 2017.

KIMBERLEY PHILLIPS / Psychology was chosen to participate in HERS Luce Program for Women in STEM Leadership at the HERS Leadership Institute in 2018. She was also appointed a core scientist with the Southwest National Primate Research Center, one

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of seven national centers that conduct research to help fight diseases ranging from Alzheimer’s to Zika worldwide.

DAVID POOLEY / Physics and Astronomy and colleagues published “An Active Galactic Nucleus Caught in the Act of Turning Off and On” for The Astrophysical Journal, 2017, Vol. 849, Issue 2.

DAVID RIBBLE ’82 / Biology and colleagues published “Sengis (Elephant-shrews) in North-eastern Namibia” in Journal Namibia Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft, 2017, Vol. 65.

With a colleague, Ribble also published “Preliminary observations on home ranges and natural history of Scotinomys tenguina in Costa Rica” in Mammalia in 2018.

DIANE SMITH / Geosciences was invited to present “Basaltic lavas of Mount St. Helens: evidence for diverse mantle sources and input from more evolved magmas” at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Seattle, Wa., in October 2017. In 2018, Smith was honored as the Imogene and Harold D. Herndon Distinguished Professor of Geology at Trinity University in San Antonio.

JENNIFER STEELE / Physics and Astronomy along with C. Ramnarace* and W. Farner* published “Controlling FRET Enhancement Using Plasmon Modes on Gold Nanogratings” in the Journal of Physical Chemistry C, 2017, Vol. 121, Issue 40. Along with R. Hure ’17, S. Simoneau ’17, and Bert Chandler / Chemistry, Steele also published “Two-Color Metal-Enhanced Fluorescence Using Gold Slotted Nanogratings” in Plasmonics, 2017, Vol. 12, Issue 5.

ADAM URBACH / Chemistry and colleagues Christina Cooley / Chemistry, Laura Hunsicker-Wang / Chemistry, and Corina Maeder ’99 / Chemistry

received a grant from the National Science Foundation for $274,770 toward the purchase of an electrospray time-of-flight mass spectrometer to support undergraduate research and laboratory courses at Trinity. Urbach received the Academic Research Enhancement Award for $400,281 from the National Institute of Health to support his project, “Supramolecular Strategies for the Controlled Release of Protein Drugs,” in 2017. In collaboration with five professors at major universities, Urbach also received a grant from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement for $25,000 to start a program to improve the career mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students. He was the guest editor of “Special Issue: Cucurbiturils and related Cavitands” for the Israel Journal of Chemistry, 2018, Vol. 58, Issue 3-4. In June 2017, Urbach gave the invited lecture “Predictive Recognition of Polypeptides by Cucurbit[n]urils” at the 5th International Conference on Cucurbiturils in Brno, Czech Republic. Also in 2017, he gave the plenary lecture at the 1st Workshop in Chemical Biology in Santiago, Chile. Urbach is on the 2018 Editorial Board for the Journal of Supramolecular Chemistry.

In 2017, he received the Cottrell Scholar Collaborative Award for excellence in science.

MARILYN WOOTEN / Chemistry , Leslie F. Bleamaster III ’98 / Geosciences, M. Conner ’18, E. Garcia*, G. Levine ’18, M. Santos ’18, and H. Syed ’18 launched 24 ozonesondes into the stratosphere for ozone level determination in San Antonio from August to October 2017. The project was coordinated with St. Edward’s University and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Works / SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, and MATHEMATICS

Les Bleamaster ’98 (far left) and Marilyn Wooten (far right) supervise the on-campus launch of a balloon equipped with an ozone sonde.

UP IN THE AIR Trinity researchers take to the skies to measure San Antonio ozone levels

by Nicolette Good ’07

Five students were spotted on campus launching large, high-altitude balloons into the air last year.

Standing six and a half feet tall, the white balloons were equipped with instruments meant to answer one question: How much ozone is in Texas’ atmosphere on any given day?

The Trinity Ballooning Project began when St. Edward’s University subcontracted Trinity to collect valuable ozone data from the skies over San Antonio’s large metropolis. The project was co-sponsored by Leslie Bleamaster ’98, geosciences adjunct professor, and Marilyn Wooten, chemistry lecturer, and involved Trinity students Malcolm Conner ’18, Enrique Garcia ’19, Gabriel Levine ’18, Mariel Santos ’18, and Huda Syed ’18, as well as a student from the University of Texas.

From August to October 2017, the team launched 24 balloons equipped with ozone sondes—probes that capture information about the gases around it and automatically relay their findings to the Trinity team on the ground. Each launch required roughly eight hours of work, from preparing the sondes to field launch.

Sometimes the group would know a launch date weeks in advance. Other times, they’d be instructed to launch that very day, which meant the students had to act fast.

“We had to call three air authorities to get the OK before we could launch,” Garcia says. “They might tell us we have to launch in the next two minutes because another aircraft is coming on. When they say two minutes, they literally mean two minutes. We had to hurry up and secure everything and launch.”

During flight, the sonde detected how much ozone was in its path. Ozone is a gas composed of three atoms of oxygen (O3). Naturally occurring ozone high in the stratosphere shields us from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays. But, ozone can be created at ground level when sunlight reacts with pollutants. Breathing ozone can trigger or worsen health problems including chest pains, coughing, throat irritation, and airway inflammation.

Once the Trinity team collected the data, it was sent to St. Edward’s professor Gary Morris, principal investigator on the initiative, where it was then interpreted and modeled. Morris, who worked in conjunction with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), shared the data among local and state officials who provide guidance for managing days with elevated levels of ozone.

“This kind of data can help a city anticipate environmental changes triggered by population changes,” Wooten explains.

The TCEQ monitors air and ground ozone levels using spectroscopy—a technology that gathers information based on how light interacts with matter in its path. Ozone has a specific light signature, which tells a spectroscopic instrument whether the gas is present.

But spectroscopy only indicates ozone is present, while ozone sondes reveal a much more detailed picture of how much ozone is at each height, from the ground up.

“We are getting a profile from the surface all the way up, and looking at the changes,” Bleamaster says.

As the balloons floated up to nearly 18 miles (30 km) above Earth’s surface, the students watched their computer screens, the results flowing in. Once risen, the balloons are meant to pop from lack of atmospheric pressure at a certain elevation, then parachute back to the ground.

“One of the things I learned from this experience is that San Antonio’s air is pretty good and clean,” Bleamaster says. “Even though we’re a potential ozone accumulator or generator, our levels are pretty low, comparatively speaking.”

“This experience helped me to understand more about the sky,” Wooten adds. “We think of air as nothing, but we are really in a soup of air. There’s a whole world in the sky. ”

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Art, TO A SCIENCE Art major and biology professor bridge left and right brains to study the aesthetics of microorganisms words by Nicolette Good ’07 photos by Anh-Viet Dinh ’15 and submitted by Katie Warford ’20

For those who haven’t thought to ask what would happen if you painted with bacteria or colored with microorganisims, you’re not alone.

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It’s part of what makes the next question so novel: What might you find if you isolate microorganisms for their aesthetic properties, rather than their biochemical traits?

A Trinity art major and biology professor are exercising both sides of their brains to find out. 

“It occurs to me when my students isolate organisms,” says biology professor Frank Healy, “the organisms exhibit other interesting characteristics or different morphologies, irrespective of their scientific properties.”

In other words, sometimes microorganisms just look plain cool.

The inquiry gained legs when Trinity’s Mellon Initiative, a program that supports scholarship in the arts and humanities, called for project proposals aimed at bridging art and science.

“I was enthusiastic about trying to blend art and science together, to put them under the same roof,” Healy says.

Healy partnered with Katie Warford ’20, a San Antonio native, for the project. Warford is not only pursuing a degree in art, but she also had limited prior scientific knowledge, which was exactly what Healy wanted. He sought a student whose notions of microbes were not framed by the context of science. Together, the art major and biology professor submitted their proposal, “The Microbial Palette at the Interface of Science and Art.”

Healy trained Warford to collect natural samples, to isolate them, and to use aseptic sterile technique in the laboratory. The team isolated and cultivated microorganisms for their aesthetic properties alone.

“Students always encounter contamination,” Healy recalls, “but Katie had an uncanny, meticulous sense of aseptic technique. She’d make a great microbiologist.”

Warford, a member of the Trinity Art Collective, says her art is often inspired by nature, but she often pondered a term she encountered in her studies: organic art. As she understood it, this referred to a method of creation that is spontaneous, and the absence of rigidity, hard lines and acute angles.

“People associate organic art with curvilinear, smooth, amorphous compositions,” Warford says of a notion she began to challenge, based on her observations in the lab. “I wanted to look at these literally organic forms—microbes—study them, and apply aesthetic principles of art and design to them.”

"I really wanted to learn from what I was working with and possibly emulate it in the artwork."

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Katie Warford and Frank Healy review data from their research, including challenges, constraints, and unexpected findings.

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Healy and Warford collected samples from stagnant water or mud puddles they found on campus or at nearby parks. Back at the lab, the pair diluted the samples, plated them, and waited—sometimes for days, depending on the organism. Once Warford saw growth, she isolated what appeared visually interesting.

“It interested me and Dr. Healy for different reasons, but both are valid,” Warford says. “Dr. Healy considered what looked morphologically interesting to him, and I thought about what looked aesthetically interesting to me.”

it in her petri dish, just as an artist might conceive of a human face before they paint it, or to create as she learned, letting the microbes’ appearances inform her artistic direction in real time.

“I really wanted to learn from what I was working with and possibly emulate it in the artwork,” Warford says. “The creation process took shape as my research progressed.”

Working with living media brought unique challenges and constraints to the process. For instance, each microbe grew at a different rate, which made synchronized growth a challenge.

"Most people think about bacteria having an amorphous circular shape, but under a microscope, they have incredibly complex patterns, even iridescent patterns bending light in weird ways.”

At the Mitchell Lake Audubon Center, for example, they found an iridescent sample, one that changed as you held it to the light to display a spectrum of color.

“That’s because of its molecular structure,” Warford says. “It has structural color that reflects light at angles differently."

“Most people think about bacteria having an amorphous circular shape,” Healy adds, “but under a microscope, they have incredibly complex patterns, even iridescent patterns bending light in weird ways.”

To compose a piece of artwork using her microbial palette, Warford understood she had several options. She could confine her piece to one single petri dish or several, and the art could be abstract or representational, like a portrait versus a still life. The choice she pondered most was whether to envision an image and set out to create

Also curious were unexpected interactions between organisms: Some grew differently when they were alone in a dish than when they grew alongside another microbe. And, living things die.

“These pieces don’t last for long. They’re transient, ephemeral,” Warford says.

In their final palette, Warford and Healy isolated 25 unique organisms, “like a painters’ set you’d get from a hobby shop,” Warford explains.

“Except, it contains microbes.”

Warford presented a poster on their project at the Trinity University Undergraduate Research Symposium. She held her own as the sole artist among many biology students showcasing their work through poster and oral presentations.

As Warford says, “Not everything can be explained with just one or the other.”

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Amer Kaissi published Intangibles: The Unexpected Traits of High-Performing Healthcare Leaders with Health Administration Press in 2017.

Works / BUSINESS and SOCIAL SCIENCES

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 incorporates the 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 A. AHLBURG / Economics published “Is going to university in Britain a wise investment?” for The Political Quarterly, 2017, Vol. 88, Issue 4. The article is a response to an article published in the U.K. arguing that higher education is not worth the cost.

Ahlburg presented “Is there an International Crisis in the Humanities” at UCL’s Centre for Global Higher Education in London in May 2018. He also presented “‘Skimming the Cream’: The Impact of Coresidence at Oxford” at Oxford University in Oxford, England, in November 2017.

SHARI ALBRIGHT ’83, ’86 / Education and Trinity University received a $429,000, one-year planning grant from the Walton Family Foundation to develop a school incubator and fellowship program aimed at improving K-12 education in the region.

LAURA ALLEN / Education is president-elect of Texas Coordinators of Teacher Certification Testing.

ROSA ALOISI / Political Science co-authored Judgment Day: Judicial Decision Making at the International Criminal Tribunals with Cambridge University Press in 2017.

ELLEN BARNETT / Education presented “How Participation in a Professional Learning Community Supported

a Pre-service Teacher’s Learning” at the European Science Research Association Conference in Dublin, Ireland, in August 2017.

BRADLEY BEAUVAIS / Health Care Administration presented “Doing Well by Doing Good - Evaluating the Influence of Patient Safety Performance on Hospital Financial Outcomes” at the Forum on Advances in Healthcare Management Research in Chicago in March 2018. He also presented “Fix These First: How the World’s Leading Companies Point the Way Toward High Reliability in the Military Health System” at the 2018 United States Naval Health Clinic Oak Harbor HRO Summit in February 2018.

Beauvais was a member of the National Snaffle Bit Association Foundation Board throughout 2017 and 2018.

BILL CHRIST / Communication , Habiba Noor / First-Year Experience, Sarah Beth Kauffman / Sociology and Anthropology, and Stacey Connelly / Human Communication and Theatre continued to perform To Be Honest: Islam and the Presidential Election in San Antonio in 2017 and 2018.

CHARLENE DAVIS / Business Administration was named president-elect for Society of Marketing Advances for 2017-2018.

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

ROCIO DELGADO / Education and a colleague co-authored “How principals can help teachers with ELLs” for Principal Leadership, 2017, Vol. 18, Issue 1. In January 2018, Delgado and S. D. Reyes* presented “An Analysis of Teachers’ Perception of Latinx Parent-Family Involvement and its Effect on Teaching Practices” at the 16th Annual Hawaii International Conference on Education in Honolulu.

ASHLEY DOUGLASS / Accounting presented “Determinants and Consequences of Assurance Purchases in Small U.S. Banks” at the American Accounting Association Auditing Section Midyear Meeting in Portland, Ore., in January 2018.

AMY HOLMES / Accounting , Shage Zhang / Finance and Decision Sciences, B. Crusius*, and C. Bales* earned the Best Public Interest Paper Award for “An Analysis of the Effects of the Financial Crisis of 2008 on Country Sustainability Efforts” at the American Accounting Association Southeast Region Meeting in Greenville, S.C., in April 2018.

ROBERT HUESCA / Communication was named the Carlos Augustus De Lozano Chair in Journalism for the Department of Communication.

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Works / BUSINESS & SOCIAL SCIENCES

E. Dante Suarez, finance and decision sciences professor, discusses Monterrey history with a group of Trinity students and faculty during a recent trip.

TRINITY-TEC PARTNERSHIP A BRIDGE BETWEEN MEXICO AND U.S. Trinity’s international ties to the Monterrey Institute of Technology open up a vibrant world for Tigers

By Jeremy Gerlach

Trinity professor Katsuo Nishikawa Chávez has a simple question for students interested in studying abroad. “For every business major who comes to me wanting to study abroad in London, I ask, ‘Why?’” says Nishikawa Chávez , director for Trinity’s Center for International Engagement. “Mexico is our third-largest trading partner at $558 billion. Go to Latin America, go to Mexico, go to Monterrey!”

Trinity gives Tigers a unique pipeline to Monterrey—a vibrant, bustling city of more than 4.7 million and home to the Monterrey Institute of Technology, billed as the “MIT of Mexico.” Tec and Trinity, separated by just a 45-minute flight, have enjoyed a special “student exchange” partnership since the early 1990s and are poised to spearhead a new wave of academic exchange between the United States and Mexico.

Professors like Nishikawa Chávez and Dante Suarez, finance and decision sciences professor, lead classes that send Tigers studying political science, math, business, sports marketing, and other subjects into the field to collaborate with Tec students.

Julia Shults ’19, a double major in economics and Spanish, took a Culture and Languages Across the Curriculum (CLAC) class with Suarez called “Doing Business in Latin America.” Here, Shults and her fellow Trinity students spent an entire semester building an import-export company with their counterparts at Tec. “I actually discovered I wasn’t passionate about business logistics. But I did enjoy working with a team that came from different countries with different perspectives,” Shults says. “I learned that I’m not content living in a bubble.”

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Ultimately, this type of “bubble-bursting” represents the true value of the Trinity-Tec partnership, first envisioned back in the 1990s by founders Richard Burr, professor emeritus of business administration, and Jorge Gonzalez, former economics professor.

This partnership fits right in line with Trinity’s dedication to experiential education, Nishikawa Chávez says.

“The sciences have laboratories, but what is the ‘lab’ for business? For political science? At Trinity, when we study international justice, we go to the International Criminal Court at the Hague in the Netherlands. We stand next to the mass graves where atrocities occurred in Serbia. And when we study international business, we explore the airports and shipping ports in Mexico where real products are being moved,” Nishikawa Chávez says.

In an age where international relationships are being strained and put to the test, Nishikawa says the TrinityTec partnership represents a worldview that looks past simple economic models and costly trade wars.

“The U.S. and Mexico, we’re so intertwined by more than our economies,” Nishikawa Chávez says. “This is our culture, that Monterrey is ‘Texan,’ and Texas is ‘Mexican.’ At Trinity, you’re ten minutes from the airport, and there you’re 45 minutes from Monterrey: 45 minutes from a different world.”

And while Nishikawa Chávez explains Monterrey has “big skyscrapers, transit, shops, and our students are always shocked that Monterrey can make San Antonio look small,” there’s at least one crucial piece of home Tigers can expect to find there: They have H-E-B in Monterrey.

Works / BUSINESS and SOCIAL SCIENCES

DENEESE JONES / Academic Affairs was inducted into the 2018 Educators’ Hall of Fame in April 2018. The honor was bestowed by the Gamma Tau Chapter of the Phi Delta Kappa national educational sorority and recognizes Jones as an outstanding educator in the San Antonio area.

AMER KAISSI / Health Care Administration published Intangibles: The Unexpected Traits of High-Performing Healthcare Leaders with Health Administration Press in 2017. Kaissi was the keynote speaker at the Leadership Development Institute for both HCA-Gulf Coast Division in Houston and for HCA-Medical City Healthcare Division in Dallas, both in April 2018.

Both talks were titled “How Humility & Kindness in Leadership Can Create a Culture of High Performance.”

compares Liu’s unique experience of conducting newsroom fieldwork in both China and the United States and reflects upon some issues of newsroom observation and in-depth interviews.

She co-authored “Media and Religion in China: Publicizing Gods under an Atheistic Governance” for Spiritual News: Reporting Religion around the World with Peter Lang in 2018. Liu also co-authored “Blurring boundaries: Exploring tweets as a legitimate journalism artifact” for Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism in 2018.

KEESHA MIDDLEMASS / Po-

nication published “Artifice and Atmosphere: The Visual Culture of Hollywood Glamour Photography, 1930-1935” in Film History, 2017, Vol. 29, Issue 3.

litical Science published Convicted & Condemned: The Politics and Policies of Prisoner Reentry with New York University Press in 2017. She also received the W.E.B. DuBois Distinguished Book Award at the 49th Annual National Conference of Black Political Scientists in Chicago in March 2018. This distinguished award recognized the book from 2016-17 that best grappled with fundamental questions of political power, race, and other intersections of oppression.

YI LIU / Business Administration and

DOMINIC MORAIS / Business

colleagues published “Individual Goal Orientations, Team Empowerment, and Employee Creative Performance: A Case of Cross-level Interactions” for the Journal of Creative Behavior in 2017. Liu and colleagues also published “Working with creative leaders: Exploring the relationship between supervisors’ and subordinates’ creativity” for The Leadership Quarterly, 2017, Vol. 28, Issue 6. In 2018, Liu co-authored “Idiosyncratic Deals and Employee Creativity: The Mediating Role of Creative Self-efficacy” for Human Resource Management.

Administration and G. Huse* were awarded a Mellon Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship to continue work on their project, “Social Racism: The Permeation of Racial Stereotypes in Professional American Football” in 2018.

PATRICK KEATING / Commu-

ZHAOXI LIU / Communication published “Doing Field Work in Chinese and American Newsrooms” in the Shanghai Journalism Review (新闻记者), 2017, Vol. 5. The article

PATRICIA NORMAN / Education co-presented “Self-care for educators: Contemplative approaches to strengthening resilience, reducing bias, and cultivating the caring heart” at the annual School Reform Initiative Fall Meeting in Atlanta in November 2017. Additionally, Norman presented “SRI Collaborative and Reflective Practices” at a retreat for San Antonio ISD academic specialists in San Antonio in 2017.

Also in 2017, she hosted the workshop “Mindfulness in Education” for the

San Antonio Museum of Art Summer Teacher Institute in San Antonio.

PETER O’BRIEN / Political Science and C. Zgourides ’16 co-wrote “Islamophilia in Medieval Spain” for Common Knowledge, 2018, Vol. 24, Issue 1.

MAURO OLIVEIRA / Finance and Decision Sciences successfully defended his doctoral dissertation, “Effects of shocks and stability of supplier-customer relationships on suppliers’ capital structure” at the University of Texas at San Antonio College of Business in 2018.

MARIA PIA PAGANELLI / Economics published “240 years of The Wealth of Nations” in Nova Economia, 2017, Vol. 27, Issue 2. She also published “We Are Not the Center of the Universe: The Role of Astronomy in the Moral Defense of Commerce in Adam Smith” in the History of Political Economy, 2017, Vol. 49, Issue 3. Additionally, Paganelli published “Adam Smith on the future of experimental evolution and economics” for the Journal of Bioeconomics, 2018, Vol. 20, Issue 1. She contributed “Adam Smith and the Scottish model of education: a Scottish bias” for The Adam Smith Review, 2017, Vol. 10. Paganelli co-edited Adam Smith and Rousseau: Ethics, Politics, Economics with Edinburgh University Press in 2018. She reviewed The Life of Adam Smith for The Adam Smith Review, 2017, Vol. 10. In 2017, Paganelli was a distinguished visiting researcher at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan. She was also honored with a grant from Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science and made a fellow at the University of Tokyo from January to March 2018. Paganelli gave 11 invited presentations and three conference presentations nationally and internationally.

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Works / BUSINESS and SOCIAL SCIENCES

JULIE PERSELLIN / Accounting

PATRICK SHAY ’03, ’05 / Health

was honored with the Innovation in Auditing and Assurance Education Award at the American Accounting Association 2018 Auditing Section Midyear Meeting. The award recognized her research published in Issues in Accounting Education.

Care Administration and a colleague published “Clustered and distinct: A taxonomy of local multihospital systems” in Health Care Management Science, 2017, Vol. 20, Issue 3. Along with colleagues, Shay presented two education sessions at the AUPHA Annual Meeting in Long Beach, Calif., in June 2017: “Maximizing innovation: Using Lightning Lab activities to exercise students’ creative muscles” and “Cultivating creative curriculum: Innovative learning opportunities in the classroom and beyond.”

GINA PIETERS / Economics and S. Vivanco ’14 published “Financial regulations and price inconsistencies across Bitcoin markets” in Information Economics and Policy, 2017, Vol. 39. Pieters was named an honorary research associate of the Centre for Blockchain Research at University College London. In January 2018, she served on a panel on Texas Public Radio’s call-in program, The Source, during a segment titled “Cash, Credit, Cryptocurrency: How Do You Choose to Pay?”

CAMILLE REYES / Communication and colleagues published “Emancipatory Broadband Adoption: Toward a Critical Theory of Digital Inequality in the Urban United States” in Communication, Culture and Critique, 2017, Vol. 10, Issue 3.

JODY ROGERS / Health Care Administration presented “The Courage to Lead: Critical Skills for Healthcare Leaders” at the American College of Healthcare Executives Cluster Seminar in Amelia Island, Fla., in April 2018.

ROBERT SCHERER / School of Business and colleagues published “Intangible resources influencing the international performance of professional service SMEs in an emerging market: Evidence from India” in the International Marketing Review, 2018, Vol. 35, Issue 1. The article developed and tested a structural equation model that supported the effects of human capital, relational capital, and entrepreneurial orientation on financial growth outcomes of small and medium-sized international firms.

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SUSSAN SIAVOSHI / Political Science published Montazeri: The Life and Thought of Iran’s Revolutionary Ayatollah with Cambridge University Press in 2017. She also organized the Iran in the World conference in San Antonio in October 2017. The conference discussed Iran’s relationships with the world’s superpowers and its neighbors.

DAVID SPENER / Sociology and Anthropology translated We Shall Not Be Moved/No nos moveran: Biography of a Song of Struggle and re-published it in Chile with LOM Ediciones in 2017.

He also published “Rememorando a Violeta el día de su fuga: Identificaciones y Reafirmaciones” in Izquierdas, 2018, Vol. 42.

AMY STONE / Sociology and Anthropology published “‘You’re Really Just a Gay Man in a Woman’s Body!’: The Possibilities and Perils of Queer Sexuality” in Men and Masculinities, 2017, Vol. 20, Issue 2. Stone also published “Gender panics about transgender children in religious right discourse” in the Journal of LGBT Youth, 2018, Vol. 15, Issue 1.

JACOB K. TINGLE ’95 / Business Administration and colleagues received the National Intramural and Recreational Sports Association Research

& Assessment Award for their project on the NIRSA Championship Series.

Additionally, Tingle co-published “Why referees stay in the game” in the Global Sport Business Journal, 2017, Vol. 5, Issue 3; and with colleagues he published “Development of the Referee Retention Scale” for the Journal of Sport Management, 2017, Vol. 31, Issue 5. In March 2018, Tingle co-presented “NIRSA Championship Series volunteerism: The perceived impact on professional development” at the NIRSA Annual Conference in Denver. Tingle gave three presentations: “Sports team coaching & team building methodology: A construct for faculty-led programs,” given with Paul McGinlay / Athletics; “Models for campus and community partnerships in experiential learning,” given with Erin Hood ’03 / Experiential Learning; and “Maximizing an innovative integration of career services & experiential learning,” given with Twyla Hough / Career Services. Tingle was also featured on the Future of Sport podcast in London, England, in January 2018. The interview focused on Trinity’s “Sport in London” course, a faculty-led study abroad trip.

DELI YANG / School of Business co-authored “Global Norm of National Treatment for Patent Uncertainties: A Longitudinal Comparison between the US and China” for the Journal of World Business, 2018, Vol. 53, Issue 3.

Yang also co-published “Effectiveness against Counterfeiting - Four Decades of Strategic Inquiry” in the Handbook of Research on Counterfeiting and Illicit Trade with Edward Elgar in 2017.

HYON YOO / Political Science received a residential fellowship to continue research for “The Relocation of U.S. Military Bases in Asia: A Comparative Analysis of South Korea and Japan,” a policy article on U.S. military bases in Asia, at the East-West Center in Honolulu in 2018.

Works / BUSINESS and SOCIAL SCIENCES

Jorge Colazo, chair of the Department of Finance and Decision Sciences, reviews course material with a small cohort of students.

BY THE NUMBERS BAT program continues growth by leaps and bounds

By Jeremy Gerlach

By any statistic, Trinity’s Business Analytics and Technology (BAT) program has seen encouraging growth this year.

Trinity’s BAT program, now in its fifth year of operation, has doubled in size each of the last three years and currently sits at more than 30 Tigers. The program has placed more than 95 percent of its majors inside the data analytics career field within three months of graduation, according to professor Jorge Colazo, finance and decision sciences chair. Trinity’s BAT majors have landed jobs at top firms such as Dell and Cisco Systems, or in the business offices of NBA teams such as the San Antonio Spurs and Orlando Magic.

And this growth is turning heads in the business community, too. The program has been awarded a $25,000 grant from the Valero Energy Foundation.

This funding, according to School of Business Dean Robert Scherer, will support experiential learning activities and projects for students, cover faculty training and development costs, and provide much-needed analytic tools for the program.

“The generous donation from the Valero Energy Foundation demonstrates the strong support that the business community has for the strategic direction of our business analytics and technology program,”

Scherer says. “This grant will enable us to enhance our cutting-edge academic programs by providing our faculty with contemporary tools and by providing our students experiential learning opportunities congruent with industry needs.”

Colazo says the program has already started making moves to expand partnerships with area organizations such as Toyota, Dell, Amazon, and Walmart.

With the Valero Energy Foundation grant, Scherer says the BAT program will be able to offer Tigers access to field trips, internships, and other experiences outside the classroom. The grant will also provide professional development support for faculty, keeping them on the leading edge of this rapidly-changing career field.

Mike Owens, Dell vice president of global shared services, says his experience with interns from Trinity’s BAT program has been eye-opening.

“The thing I see in graduates coming out of Trinity’s BAT program is, not only are they technically capable, but they have business savvy and can think critically as well,” Owens says. “They come out of college with more than an academic resume: we feel that we’re bringing in someone who is ready to step in and do real work.”

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STRONG FOUNDATION Walton, Raise Your Hand Texas funding to spur innovation, dedication for Texas schools

By Jeremy Gerlach

At Trinity, we’re lifelong learners. But thanks to two unique educational partnerships, the University is planning on having a lifelong impact on area teachers, too.

In 2018, Trinity received funding from the Raise Your Hand Texas Foundation through the Charles Butt Scholarship for Aspiring Teachers, in order to award a series of one-year, $10,000 scholarships to promising individuals interested in teaching in the state of Texas. Trinity also was awarded a $429,000 planning grant from the Walton Family Foundation, Inc. to help spur innovation and collaboration across area public and charter schools.

RAISE YOUR HAND TEXAS The Raise Your Hand Texas scholarships are part of a $50 million Raising Texas Teachers initiative, and Trinity University is one of 11 Raising Texas Teachers partners receiving these scholarship funds. “Our hope is the students share what they learn, and the program will continue to grow and make an impact throughout the state,” said Laura Allen, professor of education and scholarship administrator at Trinity.

The inaugural cohort of 100 scholarships across the state was chosen from a pool of 350 candidates through a competitive selection process. The program will grow to provide 500 teaching scholarships annually. Recipients are committed to teaching in high-needs Texas public schools or in hard-to-fill subject areas.

WALTON FAMILY FOUNDATION The Walton planning grant, according to former education chair and Murchison Professor of Practice Shari Albright ’83, ’86 will go towards the design and creation of a new school incubator and principal fellowship program. This program will bring world-class design training and support for innovative school designs and executive training for principals to support the launch of the new schools.

“This is part of Trinity’s DNA,” Albright says. “The planning grant will help us continue to be an intellectual resource for area innovation and educational development.”

While Albright left Trinity in July—coincidentally to serve as president for the Raise Your Hand Texas Education Foundation—she will continue on with the University part-time specifically to support this initiative.

“This is an opportunity for all folks to come together, and there’s rich opportunity in having our traditional school district folks talking to our charter folks,” Albright says. “These partnerships are part of our belief system about how higher education and school systems should collaborate with one another. For Trinity, the generous planning grant from the Walton Family Foundation represents a next step on that trajectory.”

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A group of Trinity students, faculty, staff, and alumni marched in San Antonio’s Pride Parade in June 2018.

Point of

PRIDE Trinity team studies resilience of San Antonio’s LGBTQ community words by Miriam Sitz Grebey ’10 photos by Anh-Viet Dinh ’15

This past summer, a team of researchers and students set out to study resilience in San Antonio’s LGBTQ community. Supported by a 2017 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the three-year project, called Strengthening Colors of Pride, sheds light on the ways that difficult childhood experiences can affect LGBTQ individuals well into adulthood, while also exploring the strategies people develop to overcome adversity. 

Amy Stone, a Trinity University sociology professor who studies belonging and marginalization in the LGBTQ community, led the project with Roberto Salcido of the Pride Center San Antonio and Phillip W. Schnarrs, a professor from the University of Texas at Austin’s Dell Medical School. Four Trinity students conducted the first phase of research during summer 2018.

“Being part of the LGBTQ community, this topic Dr. Stone wanted to explore is something close to my heart,” says sociology major Samsara Davalos Reyes ’19, a senior McNair Scholar and first-generation college student. The Houston native came to Trinity planning to major in engineering, but quickly discovered her interest in sociology while taking a course with professor Sheryl Tynes, who also serves as Trinity’s vice president for Student Life. “I started taking more classes”—including “Social Research Design” with Stone—“and found I really loved it,” Davalos Reyes says.

The first step of the Strengthening Colors of Pride project was to conduct a short survey, asking

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participants about their connectedness to San Antonio’s LGBTQ community, physical and mental health, resiliency, and demographics. The four students—Davalos Reyes, Katherine Sibley ’19, Philip “Monty” McKeon ’19, and Sarah Davis ’20—spearheaded the outreach effort, attending some 50 official and informal Pride events during May and June, making connections at social gatherings such as poetry slams and drag shows, and leveraging their own personal networks. Davalos Reyes, who is bilingual, translated the questions into Spanish to make the survey more accessible to a diverse audience. All told, the students’ efforts garnered almost 880 responses, including 525 fully completed surveys. Because the researchers were studying resilience, some of the questions on the survey shed light on respondents’ Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) score—a measure of physical and emotional abuse, neglect, and other hallmarks of a rough childhood, such as having a family member who experienced addiction problems or went to prison. The higher the score, the rougher the respondents’ childhood appeared to be.

above Monty McKeon ’19 (left) and Samsara Davalos Reyes ’19 (center) discuss findings on childhood trauma rates with Amy Stone. left Stone (center) works with Phillip W. Schnarrs (left) from the University of Texas at Austin’s Dell Medical School and Robert Salcido (right) from the Pride Center San Antonio. The research team and Strengthening Colors of Pride are supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

One of the most striking findings from the survey related to this score: More than 50 percent of respondents had an ACEs score of 4 or higher (out of 10). “That’s very unusual,” says Stone, explaining that nationally, just 12 percent of all adults have scores of 4 or higher. This difference led them to look more closely at relationships between parents and children when LGBTQ people are young. Stone emphasizes that the study’s findings do not indicate that having experienced adversity as a child makes someone LGBTQ. Rather, their data suggests “that LGBTQ adults were targeted as children,” Stone explains.

The team’s research also found that younger people, ages 16 to 24, had some of the highest ACEs scores. “They grew up when it was much more acceptable to be LGBTQ,” Stone says, “so they were more likely to come out when they were younger. Instead of kids coming out when they’re 18 or 19, they’re coming out when they’re 12, in a much more vulnerable position, and more likely to have issues with their family.”

“The survey was really a gateway into an interview project,” Stone says. The researchers used the responses to select a smaller group of individuals for in-depth, in-person conversations about overcoming challenges from their youth.

“We wanted to do interviews about resilience with people who have had reason to be resilient,” Stone says, so the team invited 82 people with a relatively high ACEs score or a very low income (under $30,000 annually) to participate in interviews, making sure to include at least 30 individuals from each of the major racial groups in San Antonio: Anglo, Latino/a, and African American.

The students conducted the bulk of these interviews, which typically ran 60 to 90 minutes long, and initially worked in pairs. “Once we started getting the hang of it—recognizing the conversation patterns and how we should ask questions— then everyone started doing interviews on their own,” says Davalos Reyes.

In these interviews, Davalos Reyes was interested to hear that families can be a source of resilience for LGBTQ people facing adversity.

“Often when we asked, ‘Who is your role model for resilience?’ people would say their mother,” she says. “Even if sometimes their mother didn’t accept their sexuality, she had taught them how to be strong and how to persist. So we found that it’s not black and white, either full acceptance or not. It’s a negotiation—family or culture can be a source of resilience, but there can still be some problems there.”

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“I got compliments on [the student researchers] from people in the community and members of my research team. A colleague from a larger university told me, ‘Our undergrads don’t do this kind of work!’”

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Stone also observed a “fierceness in the LGBTQ community,” noting how some respondents “were willing to use their family as models for resilience, but were also really clear with family members that if they weren’t supportive, they would end those relationships.”

Stone credits the team of Trinity students for the great breadth and depth of data gathered during the first phase of Strengthening Colors of Pride. “They were absolutely amazing—very professional and organized,” Stone says. “I got compliments on them from people in the community and members of my research team. A colleague from a larger university told me, ‘Our undergrads don’t do this kind of work!’”

The experience also made a significant impact on the students as well. “I interviewed six people last year for the McNair Scholars program, and I thought that was a lot,” Davalos Reyes says. “Interviewing 60 was a completely different thing. I got to see it from the very start—going to events, recruiting people, speaking to those individuals—which was very special, because it was a full circle. I’d never done anything like that.”

The researchers and students alike found the interview experience emotionally exhausting at times. Davalos Reyes remembers how one individual who told her that, as a young adult, he had “an entire wall full of obituaries of friends he’d lost to HIV and AIDS,” she says. “Hearing that from someone who is part of the LGBTQ community, who went through so many struggles, it connected me more to my community.” She recalls how they made boxes of tissues available at the interviews, which were used by the participants and research team alike. “Dr. Stone was very conscious that this was heavy stuff and encouraged us to take a moment for ourselves, to take a break when we needed to,” Davalos Reyes says. “But we all persisted and kept wanting to do this work, because we all felt invested.”

Now that the first phase of the project is winding down, the researchers are preparing for a second round of surveys, which Stone says will be longer—taking roughly 30 minutes to complete, as compared to 10—and more comprehensive. The researchers will again be joined by another group of students charged with recruiting participants.

Though the data is still being analyzed, the team is already considering potential outcomes and applications of their research. “We’re hoping to shape new policies about the LGBTQ community, especially related to healthy behaviors and how to cultivate more resilience to adversity within this population,” Stone says. “We also plan to put together some programming about ACEs, childhood trauma, and health for Pride center organizers, so they know how to develop programs around these topics and issues.

Davalos Reyes, who is graduating this spring and planning to pursue her master’s degree in teaching, notes that she gained personal enrichment from being part of the project, as well. “I learned about respectfully integrating into a community,” she says. “It’s something you have to do with a lot of awareness of the places you’re entering—knowing that you’re not just there to recruit people, but to genuinely listen to them and get to know them. That’s going to help me when I go off to be a teacher, because I want to make sure I am really integrating myself and getting to know a community as a whole.”

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s funding of Strengthening Colors of Pride will conclude in 2020, but Stone plans to continue down this line of research. “It has already spawned an idea for a new project examining the effect of anti-LGBTQ legislation on the mental health of LGBTQ people in San Antonio,” Stone says.

“We’re already looking for funding for a spinoff study next summer!”

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Twyla Hough gave conference presentations on experiential learning and the liberal arts. Hough is a coordinator for Trinity's 1869 Scholars alumni mentorship program.

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.

JENNIFER ADAMO / Risk Management and Insurance received the Rhea Fern Malsbury Memorial Award, the highest recognition for staff members at Trinity.

SCOTT BROWN / Experiential Learning presented “Experiential Learning in the Co-Curricular: White Students’ Awareness of Power & Privilege in Alternative Break Programs” at the National Society for Experiential Education Annual Conference in St. Pete Beach, Fla., in September 2017.

RICHARD BUTLER / Alumni Relations and Monica Martinez / Major and Planned Gifts presented “How Those Iconic Professors (you know the ones!) Can Open Doors to Alumni Engagement” at the CASE District IV Annual Conference in Fort Worth, Texas, in March 2018.

PAUL CHAPA / Trinity University Police Department , as president of the Hispanic American Command Officers Association, facilitated the signing of a training agreement between the National Police of Panama and the Trinity University Police Department in San Antonio in July 2017. In May 2018, Chapa presented to several police departments throughout Mexico about increasing their community outreach. He also received the 2017 Bill G. Daniels Award for outstanding

administration by the Texas Association of College and University Police Administrators in December 2017.

DUANE COLTHARP / Academic Affairs was chosen to participate in the 2018-2019 Senior Leadership Academy, co-sponsored by the Council of Independent Colleges and the American Academic Leadership Institute, in 2018.

COURTNEY CUNNINGHAM / Information Technology Services presented “UX for IT: Improving Department Communications” at the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges Conference in San Antonio in June 2017.

VEE DUBOSE / Strategic Communications and Marketing received three awards from Graphic Design USA for her designs of the Stieren Arts Enrichment Series brochure, the Flora Cameron lecture poster, and the Ruth McLean Bowman Bowers lecture poster.

NANCY ERICKSEN / Center for International Engagement received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Association of Foreign Student Advisers for her work in the Center for International Engagement in 2018.

ENDER ERGUN / Information Technology Services presented “TU Life: Trinity’s University’s Implementation of Ellucian Mobile” at the Consortium

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

of Liberal Arts Colleges Conference in San Antonio in June 2017.

DIANA HEEREN / Finance and Administration was honored as a 201819 National Association of College and University Business Officers Fellow in May 2018.

KATHERINE HEWITT / Wellness , along with Kristen Harrison / Athletics and Jackie Bevilacqua / Health Services, helped Trinity secure gold-level status from the Healthy Workplace Recognition program in December 2017. The San Antonio Business Group on Health and the Mayor’s Fitness Council recognized local employers for the worksite wellness efforts.

JAMES HOLZBACH / Advancement Services along with John Orange / Advancement Services and Brenda Trevino-Nunez / Advancement Services presented “Data-Driven Advancement in Action” at the CASE District IV Annual Conference in Fort Worth, Texas, in March 2018.

TWYLA HOUGH / Career Services and Duane Coltharp / Academic Affairs presented “Bridging the Liberal Arts-Vocational ‘Divide’” at the American Council of Academic Deans 74th Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., in January 2018. Hough and Jacob Tingle ’95 / Business Administration

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Works / STAFF

presented “Maximize and Integrate Experiential Learning” as part of the National Association of Colleges & Employers webinar series on professional development in September 2017.

LISA JASINSKI / Academic Affairs

ACADEMIC AUDIBLE Trinity football shines in the classroom under new initiatives from coach Jerheme Urban

by Jeremy Gerlach

As an NFL receiver for the Cardinals, Chiefs, Cowboys, and Seahawks, Jerheme Urban ’03 went stride-for-stride with some of the world’s best football players.

As Trinity football’s head coach, Urban has encouraged players to make major strides in the classroom, too. Thanks to a series of academic initiatives, his team has risen its cumulative GPA from 2.82 to 3.01 over the past four years, along with improved team retention rates and academic progress rate.

“What’s been separating us from other schools is actually how selective we are,” Urban says. “We can be honest with recruits that they’re going to be challenged academically—but the type of kids we want here at Trinity, they’ll embrace that.”

First, the team holds a writing-intensive summer bridge program for first-years to help new students understand the expectations of college-level writing and develop time management skills.

Players also go through the first-year academic success program, run by assistant coach Paul Michalak. This program requires players to keep a calendar, meet weekly to review all of their upcoming assignments, and work with every professor to keep an accurate tab on their graded and upcoming assignments.

Urban’s third initiative is an innovative one: having his student-athletes sit in first two rows of every class.

“You don’t want to be the last guy in the line for interviews, so we don’t want you being the guy in the last row for class,” Urban says.

Urban’s final initiative has been transitioning to morning practices. This “helps free up the rest of day for academics” and also keeps his players out of the Texas heat.

“The research on practice performance in the morning is through the roof, and it also primes your system to go be a great student the rest of the day,” Urban says. “And this is a two-way street: my players have their afternoons and evenings back, and I get to see my kids at dinner, too.”

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was awarded a dissertation writing fellowship from The Graduate School at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as the Dr. Bill Lasher Doctoral Student Excellence Award for demonstrating research, academic, and teaching excellence as well as leadership and service from the Program in Higher Education Leadership. Jasinski also gave two co-presentations: “Using Faculty Voices to Support Global Engagement and Social Responsibility” at the Association of American Colleges and Universities Global Education Conference in New Orleans, La., in October 2017; and “Os excluídos: How the Western Model for Study Abroad Promotes Inequity and Imagined Future Alternatives” at the Comparative and International Education Society conference in Mexico City, Mexico, in March 2018. At the Association for the Study of Higher Education in Houston in November 2017, Jasinski gave a roundtable, “From the Center to the Margin”: Senior academic administrators who return to the faculty,” and presented a poster titled “Faculty as Global Learners: The Impact and Implications of Leading Study Abroad/ Study Away Programs.”

JESSIE JIANG / Center for International Engagement and Robert Seese / Center for International Engagement gave two co-presentations: “D-I-E-R: A Tool to Facilitate Cross-cultural Learning and Interaction” at the National Association of Foreign Student Advisers Annual Conference in Los Angeles in June 2017; and “D-I-E-R Method for Cross Cultural Learning and Interaction” at the San Antonio Forum in San Antonio in June 2017. Jiang also co-presented “The Name Game:

Works / STAFF

Practical Field Guide to International Student Names” at the National Association of Foreign Student Advisers Region III Conference in San Antonio in October 2017, as well as “Financial Documentation: Exploring School Policy” at the San Antonio Forum in San Antonio in February 2018. In October 2017, Jiang presented “D-I-E-R: A Tool to Facilitate Cross-cultural Learning and Interaction” at the National Association of Foreign Student Advisers Region III Conference in San Antonio.

JOHN ORANGE / Advancement Services , Michael Bacon ’89 / Alumni Relations and Development, Christine Martinez / Alumni Relations, and Jim Stryker ’14 / Annual Giving co-published “Designing an alumni engagement scoring model to measure relationships and raise more money” in the Journal of Education Advancement & Marketing, 2018, Vol. 3, Issue 1.

DAVID PERALES / Information Technology Services and Andrea Jones / Business Office co-presented “IT Administrative Governance: Trinity’s Roadmap Toward Implementation” at the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges Conference in San Antonio in June 2017.

RICHARD REAMS / Counseling Services hosted “The Evolving Basics of Competent Therapy with Gender Minority and Sexual Minority Clients”, a diversity workshop, for both the Houston Psychological Association in Houston in October 2017 and the Brazos Valley Psychological Association in College Station, Texas, in December 2017. He also hosted “Clinical and Ethical Foundations for Competent Practice with Transgender Adolescents and Adults” for the Fort Bend Psychological Association in October 2017.

ROBERT SEESE / Center for International Engagement presented “Partners in Crime: FBI, DHS, CBP, & Your Institution” at the National As-

sociation of Foreign Student Advisers Region III Conference in San Antonio in October 2017.

STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS AND MARKETING received five international marketing awards from MarCom, including two platinum awards for IMPACT magazine and the Trinity Network video and three gold awards for Trinity magazine, the Trinity University field guide, and the 2016 Trinity University Year in Review video.

GET TO THE CHAPA Trinity police chief travels internationally for innovative police program

JAMIE THOMPSON ’05 / Student Involvement was selected to participate in the 2018-2019 Council for Independent Colleges Senior Leadership Academy. In July 2018, Thompson, Jacob Tingle ’95 / Business Administration, Katie Storey / Alumni Relations, Laura Kalb ’14 / Career Services, Rachel Boaz ’10 / Residential Life, and Twyla Hough / Career Services were invited to present at the annual Association of Leadership Educators Conference in Chicago, Ill., as members of the 1869 Scholars alumni mentoring program.

ALYSE GRAY PARKER / Student Success Center was named an Archer Fellow and participated in the Archer Center’s Summer 2018 Graduate Program in Washington, D.C.

TOM PAYTON / Trinity University Press was invited to present “Cross-border Publisher Relations in the Age of Trump” at the annual Feria Internacional del Libro event in Guadalajara, Mexico, in November 2017.

TRINITY UNIVERSITY POLICE DEPARTMENT was awarded first place in the Collegiate Division by San Antonio Police for their National Night Out event, which focused on increasing community relations, in 2017.

by Susie P. Gonzalez

Trinity University Police Chief Paul Chapa participated in the Professionalization Exchange Program in Mexico, extending his support for international cooperation of law enforcement agencies.

For a week in January 2018, Chapa was one of six presenters traveling with Global Ties, a United States nonprofit that promotes international exchange programs for a variety of organizations. “It was a tremendous honor to represent Trinity University as its police chief and also to represent U.S. law enforcement and share our experiences and programs with our fellow brothers and sisters in blue,” Chapa says.

“We all agreed that we share the same commitment to public safety and all recognize the dangers that come with it.”

Training was held for nearly 100 police officers from 10 state police agencies. They covered topics such as ethics-based leadership, planning and resource management, quality-based recruiting, and training program development.

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DIALOGUE with DR. DEE A Note from the Vice President for Academic Affairs

The year of 2019 promises to be a significant time in the history of Trinity University. As we prepare to mark the milestone of our 150th anniversary, I have become even more focused on the future—especially the innovative, forward-looking pedagogy and research that will continue to distinguish a Trinity education for the next 150 years. As I think about the possibilities for the future, I am especially energized by the preparations that are currently underway to renovate and expand the Chapman-Halsell complex.

Just as we saw with the construction of the CSI building, well-designed academic spaces can affirm our shared values while encouraging student/ faculty interactions both within and outside of the classroom.

Seeking to take full advantage of this once-in-a-generation opportunity, the faculty leaders who are shepherding the plans for Chapman-Halsell and a brand new adjacent building are currently working to develop a student-centered, collaborative, interactive, and welcoming complex.

The building will become the academic home for the School of Business, Economics, Health Care Administration, and departments within the humanities. Some of the most enticing features of the new design are contemporary classrooms designed to support modern pedagogical strategies,

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especially small-group work and the ability to seamlessly connect to technology. There will be outward-facing departmental “iconic spaces” dedicated to collaborative research between students and faculty as well as other student activities, and active common spaces, including a repurposed Great Hall. The lobby of the new building and other inviting outdoor spaces will encourage students, staff, and faculty to congregate, work, and play.

These images, prepared by project architects from Lake Flato, show how Trinity will continue to embrace its history and architectural heritage—including our designation on the National Register of Historic Places—while continuing to look toward the future. And just as these drawings help us envision what some of these new academic spaces will look like, Trinity’s faculty have begun to develop the courses and other activities that will be further enhanced by the design.

Faculty members from the School of Business have been instrumental in the development of Trinity’s interdisciplinary study abroad programs in Japan, China, Spain, Germany, and Mexico.

Participating students enroll in courses that help them view the host country through many disciplinary lenses, gaining a depth of understanding that is only possible when combining approaches from financial management,

The addition of a new building will complete the Chapman-Halsell complex and provide state-of-the-art classrooms used by all departments.

business analytics and technology, political science, economics, urban studies, literature, and theatre. These off-campus programs exemplify two components of the Trinity Tomorrow strategic plan: to integrate the liberal arts and professional programs (Action Step 2B) and to pursue the creation of faculty-led study abroad programs (Action Step 3A). The new academic facilities will be designed to nurture interdisciplinary collaborations in teaching and research. Many of these partnerships could only exist at Trinity due to our diverse and distinctive mix of programs—and our facilities will now align with our strategic goals.

Additionally, the year of 2019 will bring together the Humanities Collective and the Collaborative for Learning and Teaching to sponsor an annual seminar on the importance of the humanities with regard to current political, moral, and intellectual issues. The inaugural seminar is titled “The Humanities and Democracy” and will be taught by Michael Fischer, the Janet S. Dicke Professor in Public Humanities. This seminar will explore ways that the humanities can strengthen democratic societies in an age marked by polarization and inequality. Students will interact directly with distinguished scholars and participate in public events to promote broader dialogue in the San Antonio community. Eventually, this seminar series, which is dedicated to examining the relevance of the humanities in our contemporary world, will be showcased in a prominent new classroom on the entry-level of the new building, adding its contributions to our campus.

Without a doubt, as we launch into a new year, it will be marked by a spirit of celebration. And reading about the significant accomplishments of the faculty, staff, and students in this edition of IMPACT affords us much to celebrate, so I am confident that we are headed in the right direction to remain strong for the next 150 years!

top Halsell will be transformed into an inviting academic space that houses faculty offices, new classrooms, and iconic spaces that promote research collaborations between faculty and students. bottom With the addition of comfortable furniture, the Chapman Great Hall will be reimagined as a commons space that encourages collaboration and conversation. New exterior doors will promote easy access to an adjacent courtyard.

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Established in Tehuacana, Texas, Trinity University began its first semester on Sept. 23, 1869, with five faculty members and seven students. Fast forward 150 years, and more than 250 faculty and 2,400 students comprise a top-ranked, prestigous body of lifelong learners.

Here's to 150 more, Tigers!

The Boyd House, donated to the school

by Major John Boyd, was the first building on Trinity's Tehuacana campus.

This photograph, taken in 1869 during Trinity's first semester, features a co-ed University community of faculty, staff, students, and townspeople.

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

I love interacting with students during lab classes and office hours. A lot of interesting and meaningful mentoring interactions happen in those contexts, and it's just a lot of fun!

- Christina Cooley, Department of Chemistry