This summer, I had the privilege of working as a visiting researcher in Dr. Juan Del Valle’s lab at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, IN. The Del Valle lab is part of the Notre Dame Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and a major focus of the lab is peptide and protein mimics. My specific project concerns an interaction between two proteins, Tau and Fyn kinase, that is associated with Alzheimer’s disease. I am working to develop peptides, or small protein fragments, that inhibit the Tau-Fyn interaction and therefore slow the progression of Alzheimer’s. This summer I have focused primarily on creating an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) that will be able to test whether or not the peptides I make are effective inhibitors. I will be using this assay back at Fordham as I continue my project in Dr. Nicholas Sawyer’s lab, which will ultimately provide a central focus for my senior Honors thesis.
The Del Valle lab group is composed of mostly graduate students and a few undergraduate students. Because Fordham does not have a chemistry graduate program, working among graduate students and having one of them as a mentor was a novel experience for me. I gained exposure to several new laboratory techniques, while increasing my competency as a scientist and helping with other Tau-related projects. I received valuable guidance as I navigated the numerous roadblocks of assay development, as well as academic and career advice from colleagues currently on the PhD track I hope to pursue. I also exercised independence when it came to the progression of my project, taking responsibility for experiment workflow and data analysis.
In this position, I have met fascinating people from around the world and become immersed in the campus culture of Notre Dame. I spent the summer surrounded by the cutting edge of scientific research and had the opportunity to envision my future life as a chemistry graduate student. I am beyond grateful to the Honors Program for making it possible for me to engage with the Del Valle lab and dive into my research that ultimately seeks to treat Alzheimer’s disease.
This summer, I was a research associate for a study led by Dr. Acevedo, Dr. Ross, and Dr. Azhar from Fordham’s Graduate School of Service in collaboration with the BronxWorks food pantry. Established in 1972, BronxWorks is a nonprofit organization with locations all across the Bronx that has grown to serve over 60,000 people in 2020 by providing numerous services to families and individuals, including immigration services, workforce development, housing assistance, youth education, and nutritional assistance. Along with the other undergraduate students Olivia Youngblood, Hasib Mia, Ver Sogueco, and Camila Da Silva, I surveyed food pantry clients to hear about their experiences during the pandemic and learn about the impact COVID-19 has had on food insecurity throughout the Bronx.
Amalia Sordo Palacios, Honors Class of 2023
After taking Dr. Acevedo’s Bronx Exploration seminar as a freshman and reading South Bronx Battles: Stories of Resistance, Resilience, and Renewal by Carolyn McLaughlin, the former executive director of BronxWorks, I was excited for the opportunity to engage with and work alongside the nonprofit that we had learned so much about. I began the summer hoping to gain a better understanding of public health research and community-engaged work through my hands-on role as a Research Assistant.
Honors senior, Olivia Youngblood, conducts a survey with a BronxWorks participant.
While I did learn a lot about qualitative research, the most memorable aspect of this project was the relationships that I formed. After a year of being at home and taking classes remotely, it felt really special to be back in the Bronx and meeting new people face to face. As a Spanish speaker, I connected with immigrant clients from the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and other Latin American countries and was fully attentive to the stories that they shared during the surveys.
Honors students conducting surveys with BronxWorks.
I am especially grateful for the support and wisdom imparted to us by Dr. Azhar, Dr. Acevedo, and Dr. Ross. They were always excited to share their research interests, current projects, career/life advice, and experience in academia with us. The staff at BronxWorks was also incredibly welcoming to our team and inspiring in their dedication to their work. I am excited for the next stage of the research project and hope that the results will be able to support BronxWorks as they continue their mission of empowering individuals and families in the Bronx community.
An LSA client family attends an outdoor partner event.
Author: Caroline Albacete, senior
The Little Sisters of the Assumption have been serving East Harlem since they arrived from Paris in 1891. Their current operation, the LSA Family Health Service, has been in operation since 1958. I knew very little about LSA until the fall of 2020, but the more I learn about their work, the more I marvel at their impact.
The Honors Program’s own Dr. Brenna Moore has been involved with LSA for a number of years. She brought the organization to Fordham’s attention in 2020, and has been leading a team of Fordham professors and students to research the organization and quantify its impact. The team is working to find out which of the resources and services LSA clients have found most useful over the years. Throughout the fall semester, Fordham professors and students collaborated to conduct interviews with LSA staff and clients, as well as conduct archival research. The project will culminate in a journal article that can help secure more funding for LSA and show concrete evidence of the ways in which the organization has helped the community.
Caroline Albacete, Class of 2021
I first met Dr. Moore during the fall of my junior year for an Honors’ course, Religion in the Modern World. She invited me to join the team in the fall of 2020. She knew I spoke Spanish and could do translation work, which would prove useful during the interview period because the majority of LSA’s clients are immigrants from Central and South America. The interviews we conducted ended up being almost entirely in Spanish, which we then translated into English for the researchers who did not speak Spanish. It was not always an easy process—mostly due to technological difficulties; we conducted the interviews over Zoom because we could not do them in person during the pandemic—but it was interesting to begin to spot patterns about which of LSA’s services clients appreciated the most.
LSA offers a whole host of services. Many of the women I spoke with or whose interviews I translated particularly appreciated the English courses LSA offered. Some of the mothers enjoyed the socialization groups and after school activities their children could participate in. Even more appreciated the help the LSA staff gave in navigating the NYC school system. LSA, I realized, has done a lot for the East Harlem community.
I’d previously done some volunteer work in the Bronx, but working with Dr. Moore to research LSA has reminded me how vital nonprofit organizations are for creating community. I’m glad I’ve had the opportunity to help quantify LSA’s impact so that the organization can receive the recognition it deserves and continue its work in the future.
LSA parents and children take part in LSA’s Parenting and Child Development Program.
With support from the Honors Program, I recently attended a symposium at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service; titled “Venezuela: Charting the Future,” the symposium brought together scholars, policymakers, business leaders, and civil leaders to discuss how the United States, Latin America, and the global community can facilitate economic growth, social peace, and political stability in Venezuela.
I applied for an Honors Ambassadorial Grant to attend the symposium to support work on my senior thesis, which uses a game theoretical model of political survival to understand why chavismo (the political movement founded by former president Hugo Chavez) has survived in Venezuela since 1999. The purpose of my project is to identify the equilibrium levels of taxation, private goods, and public goods that Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro have selected throughout their presidencies.
As a mathematics and economics joint major, I was prepared to work with the model. However, I did not have the necessary background in Latin American economics and political theory to apply it. Fortunately, at the symposium, I learned about potential data sources, key economic and political developments in Venezuela, and I networked with the panelists.
I thank the Honors Program for awarding me an Ambassadorial Grant and Dr. Barbara Stolz, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, whom I met through the Honors Alumni Network, for inviting me to attend the symposium.
Bernadette Haig is a Rose Hill Honors senior with a double major in Engineering Physics and Classical Civilizations. A woman of motivated curiosity with a clear love of learning, Bernadette has participated in many research projects in different areas of physics, while also studying Latin, Greek, and the ancient world. I had the opportunity to speak with Bernadette about her double major, her experiences inside and outside of Honors, and her plans for after graduation.
Continue reading for an in-depth interview with Bernadette!
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M: What made you decide to pursue a double major?
B: What really got me into the Classics major was the Honors Program. Professor McGowan taught my first class in the Honors Program at 9:30 in the morning in Alpha House, Ancient Lit, and he just so clearly loved what he was teaching; that was probably one of my favorite [classes.] He said that I should consider a minor in classics and I thought, “Well, why not!” So I started taking a couple classes. Second semester freshman year I took Roman Art down at the Lincoln Center and loved it, and then sophomore year rolled around and I took a couple of classes in Latin and thought, “Wow this is amazing, I’m going to keep taking this!” The classes started to add up and I had wanted to take Greek too because it was just on this strange bucket list of things I want to do over the course of my life – learn a little bit of Latin and Greek. By the time I got into junior year, I started Greek, kept taking Latin, and took the study abroad class Ancient Roman Cities. At that point, my advisor told me I was close to finishing a major so I decided to complete the requirements.
It’s been a lot of fun; it’s something different. Obviously I adore physics, that’s what I’ll be doing with my life I hope, and I will probably never come back to this again in a concrete way. But I’ve just so enjoyed it — tackling ancient texts just for the purpose of doing so.
M: What is your favorite thing about the Honors Program?
B: I would say my favorite thing about Honors as a whole is the breadth of the curriculum because I’ve been exposed to things in Honors that I know for a fact I would never have taken on my own. Even first semester taking art history, art was so not my thing, but the more we started to be in the class and learn about what art history really was, the more I started to love how peoples’ cultures are reflected through their art – their values, their customs – and how much you could learn from reading art if you knew what you were doing. But I never would have taken that on my own, and [the same goes for] the few philosophy classes that I’ve taken through the Honors program – not that I don’t find them interesting, but as a physics major I probably never would have taken [these classes] on my own if I didn’t have to.
What I also love is the critical environment. If you blurt something out in a seminar class, you better be ready to defend it. You can’t have a half-formed opinion, which is kind of frustrating but also for me I’ve found that it forces me to have really fleshed out ideas, and that has carried over even outside of the Honors Program. I find myself wanting to really engage with my own opinions critically, and this is something that I’ve really found to be beneficial.
M: What was your favorite internship/research project you did during your time at Fordham or one that taught you a lot?
B: The two major projects that come to mind are the ones that I’ve done this past summer and then the summer before. The summer before my junior year I was here at Fordham doing research in the physics department and we were using Raman spectroscopy to look at cancerous tissue compared to healthy tissue to see if the signature looks different in healthy tissue as opposed to cancerous tissue. We were working with Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan and they essentially gave us people’s cancers to study. They wanted to include the project that we were developing into a surgical robot so that if they were going to do robotic surgery, they could check to see that the margins were clear to make sure they removed all the cancer, and do that without excising the tissue and sending it to the lab; they have to do that all while the patient is still under anesthesia and it takes about 45 minutes. So we developed a new probe that was much more precise than some of the other [tools] that my professor had worked with in the past. That was really exciting because this was my first experience with “real” research, working on something that was going to matter. Our research is going to be published in a journal called Review of Scientific Instruments and so the probe that we developed is really the focus of the research so that will be really cool; I don’t know when it will be published but it is still really exciting.
This past summer I was doing completely different work out at the Fermilab in the Chicago area. It’s a particle physics lab and I was working on a piece of equipment in their neutrino beam line that was malfunctioning. Basically I got there and they said to me, “Your project for the summer is going to be to figure out why this thing is not working and what we should do about it.” It was a really cool project and I got a lot of training and got to go down into the ground 300 feet underground to work on this piece of equipment. In order to look at it and install what we needed I had to take a huge elevator down and it was really exciting but also very frustrating because I had to deal with a lot of real workplace issues, like my supervisor was not the most helpful person and would sometimes disappear or did not know the project very well because he was new to the department. Everyone was very nice and it was a great place to work because of the general atmosphere, but I did encounter a lot of those logistical issues. I would say that those taught me a lot about working in general outside of academia, which was again really frustrating but really cool.
Neither of those projects are in fields that I will be going into, so it has been neat to do research that’s a little outside of where I want to go because I will probably never get that chance again.
M: How do you think Honors has influenced your opportunities and decisions throughout college? Is there anything that you learned in Honors (information or a skill) that you have seen specifically come into play in your non-Honors/work experiences thus far?
B: I would say the critical thinking has been the biggest chance that I’ve seen in myself in terms of when I evaluate myself as a student. Being more critical about the information that I’m hearing or the things that I’m working on, and not just accepting things at face value and if I have an opinion formulating it really carefully and making sure that it’s something that I really do believe as opposed to something I’ve just always assumed.
I don’t know if I’ll ever come back to all of the interests that I’ve developed through Honors, but like I said about Classics, it’s been really great to just do something for the fun of it. I’ll probably never come back to Latin or Greek, which on the one hand is kind of sad, but on the other hand has been really, really neat. I feel like that has made me a more curious person. The fact that I have been exposed to all of these different things and found them very interesting everywhere I’ve gone has made me more inclined to try new things. I knew coming into college I wanted a broader undergraduate experience and that I wanted to be exposed to things outside of my own field and so Honors has honestly been perfect for me – it’s everything I could have ever wanted out of a college experience.
M: What are you looking forward to? What are your plans for after graduation?
B: I’m going to graduate school for a Masters degree in aerospace engineering and right now the best offer on the table is Stanford – I’m still waiting to hear back from a couple of other schools but I’ll be going out to visit Stanford next week and they have a lot of cool projects going on there. They have an aerospace robotics laboratory, which is everything I could have ever wanted; it has my name written all over it. But like I said, I’m still waiting on a couple of other schools so I just want to evaluate all my options and go out and visit to see the environment and make my decision based upon those factors also.
There are certain things that I’m a little worried about leaving Fordham — I’m really involved with Campus Ministry and I have experienced so much personal spiritual growth through that ministry so I’m a little concerned about what will happen to that part of me when I leave Fordham. I will obviously miss Fordham a lot; it’s been such a great place for me and has ended up being exactly the place I needed to be. I’m sure I won’t be gone for good!
The Honors Program had a strong presence at the Fordham College Rose Hill 2017 Undergraduate Research Symposium. Honors students from sciences, humanities, and social sciences gave oral presentations and presented posters on their research.
For example, in an oral presentation panel focused on cancer research at Fordham, two of the three presenters were honors students: senior Carolyn Allain (chemistry) and junior Bernadette Haig (physics). Carolyn presented on the angiogenic implications of mutant adenoviral E4ORF1, and Bernadette on innovative Raman spectroscopy for diagnosing head and neck squamous cell carcinoma. Honors students spoke in other oral presentation rooms as well, on topics as various as refugee resettlement in upstate New York, Italian silent cinema, and historical trends in the United Mineworkers of America.
Carolyn Allain, senior
Bernadette Haig, junior
Besides oral presentations, there were also poster presentations at the event. Honors students were highly visible here as well. From a project on counter-terrorism through deep learning to drug delivery vehicles for cancer inhibition, honors student research from this past year was both prominent and exciting. We can’t wait to see what research honors students work on this coming year!
