Faculty and Staff Accomplishments

Deborah Adams, Ph.D., assistant professor of physical education and human performance, presented, Target Games and Goal Setting with 12 students at the Southeastern Zone of New York State Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance (NYSAHPERD).

Pamela Chasek, Ph.D., associate professor of government and director for the international studies program, gave a presentation on Desertification, Climate Change and Biodiversity Loss: Exploring the Socio-Economic Interlinkages and Synergies as part of a UNESCO Roundtable at the third international conference on Drylands, Deserts and Desertification at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel (Nov. 8-11).

Jeff Cherubini, Ph.D., associate professor of physical education and human performance, recently presented the paper “Living the Good Life - Authentic happiness through quality physical education" within the symposium Physical Activity as Positive Institution: An Examination of the Body in Positive Psychology at the 25th annual conference of the Association for Applied Sport Psychology in Providence, R.I., on Oct. 29.

Ricardo A. Dello Buono, Ph.D., associate professor and chair of the sociology department, presented a paper entitled, “Gender, NAFTA, and ‘Another Possible Integration’” at the annual meeting of the Peace and Justice Studies Association (PJSA), Winnipeg, Manitoba in early October. Later that month, he was invited to deliver the inaugural lecture of the newly created sociology major at Monmouth University entitled, “Sociology: A Critical Discipline for the 21st Century.” His new book Social Change, Resistance and Social Practices (2010, co-edited with David Fasenfest) was recently published as part of the Brill Studies in Critical Social Sciences Series.

Robert M. Geraci, Ph.D., assistant professor of religious studies, published an essay on religion and science in the collection Religion and Everyday Life and Culture (eds. Hecht and Biondo) and presented two papers in November including: “The Mythic Power of Transhumanism” via Teleplace to the Transvision 2010 conference in Milan, Italy and “A Landscape of the Religious Imagination: Travel and Tourism in the Work of Neil Gaiman” at the American Academy of Religion conference in Atlanta, Ga.

Geraci also published an essay “The Popular Appeal of Apocalyptic AI” in the December issue of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science v. 45 n.4. The essay is about how people who believe in a future of uploading minds into robots and virtual reality are becoming increasingly influential in government, pop culture and education.

Shawn Ladda, Ed.M., Ed.D., physical education and human performance professor, presented at the Public Health Challenges and Achievements: 1935-2010 conference and her presentation was entitled, “1935-2010: Honoring Hofstra's Anniversary Through the Tracing of Girls' and Women's Movement Opportunities.”

Gennaro Maffia, Ph.D., professor of chemical engineering, has a U.S. patent application that was just published and is available by clicking here. The patent application describes the use of collagen as a sacrificial scaffold to make porous metallic structures. Such structures can be used for catalysis and for bone ingrowth. Current Manhattan students are working with Maffia on novel ways to crosslink the collagen scaffold. Katie Scherf, a chemical engineering graduate student, is using genipin, an extract from a gardenia, as a crosslinking agent, and the USDA suggested the project.

Walter Matystik, J.D., associate provost, was appointed to the Westchester County Board of Ethics.

Claire Nolte, Ph.D., professor of history, presented a paper entitled, “Our Golden Slavic Prague: The Czechization of the Bohemian Capital Before World War I” as part of a panel she organized for the annual convention of the Association of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies in Los Angeles, Calif., this November.

Bruce J. Shockey, Ph.D., associate professor of biology, along with his Bolivian colleague, Federico Anaya, recently published a detailed description and interpretation of their discovery of a new species of extinct sloth from Bolivia.

Their work, Grazing in a New Late Oligocene Mylodontid Sloth and a Mylodontid Radiation as a Component of the Eocene-Oligocene Faunal Turnover and the Early Spread of Grasslands/Savannas in South America has been published online by the Journal of Mammalian Evolution and will be out in the first hardcopy edition of the journal in 2011. Click here to view the published piece.