Joseph Gorman
National Merit Finalist

Gabelli School of Business at Lincoln Center
Class of 2018

Major: Global Business
Concentration: Digital Media and Technology

Joseph Gorman would love to work for Google someday.

“Going to Silicon Valley would be great,” he says, “or even investing in companies like that behind the scenes would make going to work every day really interesting.”

The incoming Fordham freshman from Wooster, Ohio, cannot think of a better place to study business “than the heart of Manhattan” at the Gabelli School of Business at Lincoln Center, where he plans to major in digital media and technology.

This major combines two things that Gorman loves, communication and technology.

“It just seems to be a natural fit,” he says. “I have always been interested in sharing stories, but I have also been interested in computers from a young age.”

Gorman first combined storytelling with technology nearly four years ago when he bought his first digital SLR camera in preparation for a 13-day trip to Maragoli, Kenya. He and his father volunteered, stayed in homes of Kenyan people they’d met, and explored the Masai Mara National Reserve. “I wanted to be able to document the trip,” Gorman says. “It was a very eye-opening experience, being fifteen years old and suddenly seeing a different way of life than what you are used to.”

He continued to use his photography skills when he returned, taking photos for his high school paper, for which he’s helping to create a website as co-editor-in-chief. He looks forward to learning more about opportunities in digital media in his studies at Fordham. “The goal for me,” he says, “is to be able to work in something I enjoy and am passionate about every day.”

When she’s not studying for her classes in marketing, Adriana Krasniansky, a rising senior at the Gabelli School of Business, is devoting her spare time to a passionate conviction: Trying to save her homeland.

Krasniansky, who was born in Ukraine, helped found Group for Tomorrow’s Ukraine in response to the deadly conflict between European-aligned nationalists and pro-Russian forces. She formed the group last November along with five non-Fordham students she grew up with in Cleveland. Through their website and social media, the team hopes to creatively and accurately relay events transpiring in Ukraine to an English-speaking audience.

In April, Krasniansky took part in a Fordham panel discussion about the unrest in Ukraine at the New York Athletic Club that drew more than 100 people.

With the goal to put a face to the protesters in Maidan Square in Kiev, the nation’s capital, the panelists showed several video clips of average Ukrainians, including a shop owner and an impassioned 80-year-old man.

The biggest misconception about Euromaidan, as the demonstrations in the capital were known, is that the protestors are disorganized and motivated by violence, Krasniansky said. In reality, “these people were incredibly organized,” she said, and even “started their own soup kitchens for the hungry.”

Krasniansky and her group have worked with National Public Radio and the U.S. House of Representatives to help convey what they see as the facts—that these demonstrations were “rooted in peace,” she said.

In addition to sharing anecdotes of life in Ukraine and providing English translations of speeches and documents on its website, the group has commissioned some university professors to provide analysis of the developments there. It has also sponsored talks at three U.S. colleges on the subject.

While Krasniansky was studying abroad at the Fordham London Centre at Heythrop College last fall, she got a text from a friend who “asked why I wasn’t in Ukraine” in solidarity with her people.

“I said I have finals and I had work, and wasn’t able to go over, and he told me this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and it’s kind of our civic duty as informed Ukrainian Americans,” she said.

Krasniansky, a former intern at the United Nations Department of Public Information and founding director of a Ukrainian-inspired design firm, bread&salt designs, made it to Ukraine in December, along with a filmmaker from DePaul University. Together they interviewed local experts and leaders—including Sen. John McCain, who was visiting Kiev to show support for Ukrainians protesting the actions of President Viktor Yanukovych. Their reporting from that trip is being made into a documentary.

Although the initial coverage of the group focused on Yanukovych’s backing out of a trade agreement with the European Union, Russia’s recent invasion and annexation of the Crimean Peninsula has shifted that issue to the background, as the territorial integrity of the country itself is now of concern.

For Krasniansky, the country represents not only her roots, but also an opportunity for entrepreneurs such as herself who have been taught at the Gabelli School to think globally. Part of what makes the country’s descent into chaos so painful is that “it’s one of the epicenters of development in our modern world,” she said. A free and democratic Ukraine, she said, could be a catalyst for change toward a more democratic Eastern Europe and Asia.

“I’m a Ukrainian American so I have a dual identity that is very hard to reconcile because, in the United States, we are so privileged in our rights that we often forget that most of the world doesn’t live with that,” she said. “That creates a veil of ignorance around [these events]. So a lot of the task is identifying the veil, accepting the veil, and overcoming it. I think that’s a very important thing for anyone to do who works in an international sphere.” President Yanukovych was removed from power in February, and on May 25 the country elected a new president, Petro Poroshenko, who aims to bring Ukraine closer to the European Union.

Group for Tomorrow’s Ukraine sent three of its members to Ukraine to report on the elections. Krasniansky coordinated coverage of their work in collaboration with WBEZ, NPR’s Chicago affiliate. “Ukrainians really want a change of life and they don’t trust the regime,” said Krasniansky at the panel in April. “The citizens—both young and old—are willing to sacrifice everything for hope.”

Reporting by Group for Tomorrow’s Ukraine can be found at projectmaidan.com.

As a student at Staten Island Technical High School, Jonathan DeAssis volunteered on a cardiothoracic surgery ward. A physician invited him to stand beside him as he performed heart surgery.

“It was a very cool experience. From that point on I wanted to be a doctor,” says DeAssis, a Brooklyn native who is the first in his family to go to college. He graduated from Fordham College at Rose Hill in May.

The pre-med student worked with Silvia Finnemann, Ph.D., associate professor of biology, developing an eye-drop detection method for identifying retinal disease in rats. The city boy confessed he never thought he’d be working with live animals.

“I wasn’t expecting that,” says DeAssis, who will attend medical school this fall. But as it turned out, he was good at it. He even traveled to the University of Notre Dame, Fordham’s partner in the research study, where he spent 10 days photographing the retinas of the rodents in one of the university’s labs.

The collaboration between the two universities came about through Fordham Science Council member John DelliSanti, FCRH ’88, GBA ’97, a former executive at Carestream. The medical imaging and IT company had invested in Notre Dame’s molecular imaging lab and was funding the study, which DelliSanti helped to oversee. While at Notre Dame, DeAssis worked on the university’s sophisticated in-vivo imaging machine, also donated by Carestream.

Pleased with the young researcher’s images and Fordham’s overall work on the study, Carestream donated an in-vivo imaging machine for Finnemann’s lab.

“It continues to be a very productive project,” says Finnemann. She hopes her research will contribute to the efforts to detect eye disease in its earliest stages.

“The fact that an undergraduate has the opportunity to participate in innovative research that has major implications for vision, for science, and for medical care—this is what students can accomplish at Fordham by seeking out a lab and volunteering and getting engaged,” says the professor.

DeAssis was “very serious about his project,” she adds, working in the lab twice a week despite his academic and volunteer commitments. He was also busy with medical school applications. This spring he learned he’d been accepted at five schools, and plans to attend Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine, which offered him a full scholarship.

The oldest of four children in a close-knit family, DeAssis grew up in the Bensonhurst/Gravesend area of Brooklyn, next door to his grandparents. When he was 16, the whole clan moved to Staten Island.

A high school teacher suggested he apply to Fordham, and when he saw the green expanses and Gothic architecture of Rose Hill, he was convinced.

“I really wanted a campus,” says DeAssis, who played intramural basketball and football at Fordham, and volunteers with FUEMS, the Fordham University Emergency Medical Service. He was also drawn to the University’s Jesuit mission to produce homines pro aliis, “men and women for others.”

“As an aspiring physician” he said, “that really appealed to me.”