Faculty and Staff Accomplishments

Dr. Patricia Sheridan, assistant professor of business law, published the article “Determining Domicile of Nursing Home Residents” in the fall 2008 issue of the North East Journal of Legal Studies. She also participated in the panel discussion “Surefire Techniques that Work in Teaching Business Law Topics” at the annual meeting of the North East Academy of Legal Studies in Business on May 2-4 in Cooperstown, N.Y.

Dr. William Merriman, professor and dean of the school of education, and Dr. Jeff Cherubini, assistant professor of physical education and performance, presented the paper “The Latino Millennial Student” at the National Summit: A Just Education in Underserved Communities, in Philadelphia on July 10th. The National Summit was sponsored by the Nativity MiguelNetwork of Schools.

Dr. Robert Geraci, assistant professor of religious studies, and Dr. Stephen Kaplan, professor of religious studies, accompanied five Manhattan College students to a presentation by author Michael Novak and Heather Mac Donald, the John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute. The event, hosted at the Harvard Club by the John Templeton Foundation Book Forum, addressed the topic of religious doubt and the Christian response to the new atheist movement.

Dr. John Tomer, professor or economics, has published the book Intangible Capital: Its Contribution to Economic Growth, Well-being and Rationality. The book can be ordered at the Edward Eigar Web site Here.

Dr. Rostislav Konoplich, visiting assistant professor of physics, was co-author of the article “A New Approach for Reconstructing SUSY Particles Masses with a few fb^-1 at the LHC” in the Journal of High Energy Physics and a review “The ATLAS Experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider” in the Journal of Instrumentation. He also recently gave the invited lecture Supersymmetry at the LHC at Moscow Technical State University in Russia.

Steve Laruccia, director of principal gifts, will be listed in the 2009 edition of Who’s Who in America.

Dr. Thelma Baxter, assistant professor of education, was honored on Sept. 20 by the Bergen County (N.J.) Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA) Sorority, Inc., for her outstanding education career. Nine women were honored for each facet of AKA’s national program, including Faye Wattleton, CEO of Planned Parenthood. The sorority was founded in 1908 on the campus of Howard University in Washington, D.C., as the first of its kind for black women. It currently has 150,000 members throughout the world. Baxter also served as a delegate during AKA’s national convention in Washington this past July. For more information about AKA, visit its Web site Here.

Dr. Nada Marie Assaf-Anid, professor of chemical engineering, and Henry Baez ’07, a graduate chemical engineering student, recently published the article “Novel and Conventional Approaches to Sterilization” in the August issue of the magazine Chemical Engineering. Assaf-Anid also has been invited to serve on the editorial advisory board of the journal Environmental Progress and Sustainable Energy, previously known as Environmental Progress. The journal is expanding its scope into new aspects of the environment, such as sustainability and sustainable energy.

Dr. Mohammad Naraghi, professor of mechanical engineering, presented the paper “A CFD-RTE Model for Thermal Analysis of Regeneratively Cooled Rocket Engines” at the 44th AIAA Propulsion Conference in Hartford, Conn., on July 21-23. He also chaired three sessions in modeling of liquid propulsion systems during the conference.

Dr. Joan Cammarata, professor of Spanish, organized and chaired two sessions at April’s 2008 Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Convention in Buffalo, N.Y. The sessions included Fashioning Feminine Identity in Early Modern Spain and Cervantes Don Quixote: The Discourse of Culture and History. In the Cervantes session, she paid homage to the renowned Cervantes scholar, Tom Lathrop, on the occasion of the presentation, festschrift, “Aqui se imprimen libros”: Cervantine Studies in Honor of Tom Lathrop. In a special session sponsored by Spain’s Ministry of Culture, Cammarata presented a tribute to Enrique Ruiz-Fornells, emeritus professor at the Universidad de Alabama, in recognition of his illustrious career and contributions as liaison between NeMLA and the Ministry of Culture.

Dr. William Merriman, dean of education, and Br. Augustine Nicoletti, assistant professor of education, received a Gold Hermes Creative Award for their article “Teaching Millennial Generation Students,” which appeared in the April/May 2007 issue of Momentum. The Hermes Awards recognize excellence in communications, advertising, marketing, public relations, design, video and Web technology.

Dr. Nicholas De Lillo, professor of mathematics and computer science, is designated as a reviewer for scholarly papers submitted for publication at SIGCSE ’09, the 40th Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education of the Association for Computing Machinery. The annual symposium will be held in Chattanooga, Tenn., on March 4-7, 2009. De Lillo will also publish a series of monographs “Design, Implementation and Application of B-Trees Using Java 6.0.” These monographs will appear as separate installments in the Technical Report Series of the Ivan G. Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems of Pace University.