This year’s graduates faced months of uncertainty as the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered college campuses across the country in March 2020. Even when they returned that fall, many of their classes were still being held online. And face masks became a part of everyday life.

Dawn Saito, an associate clinical professor in the Fordham Theatre program, and Christopher Koenigsmann, Ph.D., an associate professor of chemistry, witnessed firsthand the resilience that students exhibited in those four years.

“It was really a profound time for discovery and an exploration of how to continue to be creative,” said Saito, who teaches acting and movement classes.

 “I had not seen their faces during the rehearsal process, so it was even more poignant, because of the sacrifices, to get to that place.”

 At the height of the pandemic, when classes were all virtual, acting students had to learn techniques associated with acting for film, instead of stage, because film acting could be done on video. They learned how to incorporate graphics and animation. When they returned to in-person instruction, they had to figure out how to do scene work with half their face covered by a mask.

“I think the scene work that they did really was quite profound and still had a tremendous impact, because not only do actors use their faces, they use their intentions as characters and physical impulses to tell stories,” she said.

When the program resumed mainstage performances in the fall, students rehearsed with masks on, but took them off for shows. “These students found ways to adapt to every situation. They were on Zoom, and then they were masked, and then, thankfully, they could take them off,” she said. When they did, she said, there were gasps in the room.

Koenigsmann has been working on research with three graduating seniors—Julia Mayes, Ian Dillon, and Rosario Troia—since the fall of 2020. Like their theater counterparts, they had to adjust to working in a lab, then at home, then back in a lab. Through it all, they were able to contribute to the research of Koenigsmann’s lab, which is focused on creating atom-size structures that can be used to detect glucose.

“Chemistry research is fundamentally a hands-on thing. It requires you to go into a lab to produce samples and to test them,” he said. “During the summer of 2020, even I was like, ‘What are we going to do?’ We figured it out.”

Essentially, the students flipped the research process. While labs were off limits, they used the time to conduct a literature review, which brought them up to speed on what others had learned from conducting similar experiments. When they returned to the lab last spring, they were fully ready to pair that knowledge with experiments. They still had to learn how to make samples in the lab, but Koenigsmann said they were able to share that knowledge with their younger colleagues, which was extremely beneficial.

“When something is written on paper, that’s great. But there’s a lot to be said about having a senior student there with you and giving you tips. You know, ‘don’t do it this way, do it like this,’ or ‘here’s this helpful extra little step that maybe I didn’t write in the procedure,’” he said.

The paper that will feature the results of the students’ research will be published a little later than planned, but the fact that they were able to pivot and still contribute is a testament to their resilience, Koenigsmann said.

“These students were at the forefront of basically reinventing the wheel.”

On Aug. 26., in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the state restrictions on mass gatherings, fall classes at the University commenced under the auspices of a brand-new flexible hybrid learning model.

The model, which was laid out in May by Dennis Jacobs, Ph.D., Fordham’s provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, is designed to be both safe and academically rigorous. After being forced to pivot to remote learning in March, professors and instructors, aided by Fordham’s IT department, spent many hours this summer preparing to use this model for the fall.

Today, some classes are offered remotely, some are offered in-person—indoors and outdoors—with protective measures, and still others are a blend of both. Whatever the method, professors are engaging students with innovative lessons and challenging coursework.

Rethinking an Old Course for New Times

Barbara Mundy, Ph.D., a professor of art history, said the pandemic spurred her department to reimagine one of its hallmark courses, Introduction to Art History. The course, which covers the period from 1200 B.C. to the present day, is being taught both in-person and in remote settings to 327 students in what’s known as a “flipped” format.

Before classes are held, students are provided with pre-recorded lectures, reading material, and videos, such as Art of the Olmec, which Mundy created with the assistance of Digital and Visual Resources Curator Katherina Fostano and her staff. When students meet in person or via live video, they then discuss the material at length. The content was changed as well; it now also addresses the representation of Black people throughout history and showcases artists who tackle themes of racism.

“Because we were looking at a situation where we couldn’t just do business as usual, I proposed that we take this moment to really rethink our intro class, which we’ve been teaching for decades,” Mundy said, noting that the department has expanded in recent years to include experts in art from more diverse sections of the world.

Contemplating the Bard

Before the COVID crisis, Mary Bly, Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of English, presented materials to students in her Shakespeare & Pop Culture class and encouraged them to generate their own ideas on them during live discussions. Now she breaks her students up into pairs, and later “pods,” of about six students on Zoom, to form a thoughtful argument about a particular work of art, video, film, or theater.

“An argument is not a description,” said Bly. “It has to have some evidence or context to make their argument, say, for example, ‘This film is a racist portrayal of the play for the following reasons,’ or, ‘The director of this film pits the values of pop culture against Shakespeare and the British canon.”

To propel the conversations, she created a series of video-taped lectures with Daniel Camou, FCLC ’20. In some cases, students are expected to respond with a video of their own.

Embracing New Technologies

Paul Lynch, Ph.D., an associate professor of accounting and taxation at the Gabelli School of Businesses, is teaching Advanced Accounting to undergraduates and Accounting for Derivatives to graduate students this semester. Of the five classes, four are exclusively online, and one is exclusively in person. For his remote classes, he’s turned to Lightboard, which allows him to “write” on the screen. He jokingly refers to it as his Manhattan Project.

“I love being in the class with the students. I enjoy the interaction, and I thought that was missing,” he said. “This gives me the ability to let the students see me as if I was in class writing onto a transparent whiteboard.”

He said he hasn’t had to change much of the content. The only major difference now is that instead of passing out equations on printed paper, he emails students custom-made problems in PDF format, and then edits within that document after they’re sent back.

“I’ve always given them take-home exams, and always worked off Blackboard, so it’s just a natural extension of what I used to do in class,” he said.

In Jacqueline Reich’s class Films of Moral Struggle, students are using the platform Perusall to examine how films portray moral and ethical issues. They watch and analyze films like Scarface, a 1932 movie about a powerful Cuban drug lord, and The Cheat, which shows the early representation of Asians in American films, said Reich, a professor of communication and media studies.

Among other things, students can use Perusall to annotate scenes from movie clips, such as the classic film Casablanca, where they identified shots ranging from “establishing” and “reaction” to “shot/reverse shot.”

“It’s a really good exercise to do in class when you’re teaching film language or talking about editing or lighting, because students can pause and comment on a particular frame,” Reich said.

She meets with 11 students on Zoom on Thursdays and another eight in person at the Rose Hill campus on Mondays.

In another virtual classroom, Peggy Andover, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology, is teaching undergraduates at Rose Hill how the laws of the environment shape behavior in an asynchronous class called Learning Laboratory. Andover said that platforms like Panopto, which transcribe her lessons, can make it easier for students to look for specific information.

“Let’s say you’re studying for an exam, and you see the word ‘contiguity’ in your notes, and you don’t remember what it means. You don’t have to watch the entire lecture again—you can search for ‘contiguity’ and see the slides and the portion of the lecture where we were talking about it,” Andover said.

Graduate students teaching in the psychology program are also using Pear Deck to make their virtual classrooms more engaging on Google Slides, she said.

“You have this PowerPoint that’s being watched or engaged in asynchronously, but [Pear Deck] allows you to put in interactive features,” including polls and student commentary, she said.

“Our grad students found it’s a way to really get that engagement that they would potentially be missing when we went to online learning.”

Learning from Classmates

Aaron Saiger, a professor at the Law School, made several adjustments to Property Law, a required class for all first-year law students. Instead of meeting in person twice a week for two hours, his class of 45 students meets on Zoom three times a week for 90 minutes, an acknowledgment that attention spans are harder to maintain on Zoom.

The content is the same, but the way he teaches it had to change. While he was able to record four classes’ worth of lectures to share asynchronously, that wasn’t an option for everything.

“I’m spending less time talking to students one-on-one while everyone else listens, which is the classic law school teaching mode; we call it the Socratic method,” he said. “Everyone else is supposed to imagine that they’re the person being called on.”

Saiger’s solution is having students share two-sentence answers to questions in the Zoom chat function to gauge what everyone’s thinking about a topic, having them do more group work, and leaning more on visual material.

“The difficulties are not insubstantial, but I think we are meeting the challenges and finding a few offsetting advantages that will make it a good semester for everyone.”

Getting Creative with Lab Work

Stephen Holler, Ph.D., associate professor of physics, holds most of his experimentation class in person, with a few students attending remotely.

The in-person group is working on a hands-on solar project that allows them to learn about the material, electric, programming, and optical components of physics.

Students who are attending the class remotely are doing related mathematical work as a part of their semester-long project.

“One student is studying interference coding in optics, so I have him looking at designs in a paper,” he said. “He’s learning all the underlying physics for what goes into a portion of these mirrors that are used in laser systems.”

Christopher Koenigsmann, Ph.D., assistant professor of chemistry, is sending lab kits to the students in his general chemistry class so they can conduct experiments from home.

“We were between a rock and hard place—you can’t have the kids in the lab, and at the same time, we can’t not have some kind of hands-on,” he said.

The kits will allow students to participate in labs virtually through a Zoom webinar with their professor, as well as in breakout rooms with their lab teams.

“We adapted as many of our experiments as we could to just use simple household chemicals that are all completely safe,” he said.

Elizabeth Thrall, Ph.D., an assistant professor of physical and biophysical chemistry, likewise sent a kit to students that they can use to build a spectrometer. Students can build it out of Legos, using a DVD and a light source to create different wavelengths of light. They capture them using their computer’s webcam which processes the data. They will then design an experiment that everyone in the class will conduct.

“Designing an experiment so that you learn something, that answers the question you set out to answer, and gives a protocol that someone else can follow so they can get the same results that you got, is really at the heart of what it is to do scientific research,” she said.

—Taylor Ha, Kelly Kultys, and Tom Stoelker contributed reporting.

On Feb. 2, Fisher, a professor of theology, used his final address to his colleagues to tell his own families’ story.

“I was determined not to do one of those ‘My family is crazier than your family’ kind of histories, because I wouldn’t know how crazy anybody else’s family is,” said Fisher, who is retiring in May to spend more time in California with his son Charlie, who is autistic.

“But the complementarity of [mine and Charlie’s]cognitive systems is such a positive thing, I started to get much more positive feelings about my own family’s history. I wondered about people who may help me understand who we are.”

He discovered, among other things, that his great grandfather moved from Brooklyn to Panama in 1906 to work as a plumber on the Panama Canal. There, he became Chief and Senior Sagamore of the fraternal organization the Improved Order of Redmen.

“They wanted to transplant all the putative virtues of white American Christian Republicanism to this utopian community on the Isthmus of Panama. The Improved Order of Redmen was one of these kinds of organizations,” Fisher said, noting dryly that membership was not, in fact, open to Native Americans.

“I had to readjust the longevity of my father’s side of the families’ devotion to the Roman Catholic Church. I’d been off by 12 to 15 centuries. My great grandfather was nobody’s idea of a Roman Catholic. He was in fact, a pagan.”

He died under mysterious circumstances, and Fisher’s great grandmother moved back to Brooklyn, where Fisher discovered she lived in Vinegar Hill, next door to William Sutton, the infamous bank robber who was credited with saying he did it, “Because that’s where the money is.”

His family, which would also later call Woodbridge, New Jersey, home, also belied the popular model of Catholic immigrants flocking to parishes to create a sort of “old world communal setting.”

“My father’s family presented itself as the ultimate exemplar of just that model, but empirically it was not true. They lived where the work was; they lived on the waterfront in Brooklyn, Manhattan and North Jersey,” he said.

And although his grandparents experienced the terror of a resurgent of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920’s, they did just fine in the end.

“They were homeless in the 1930’s. By 1946, because of the war, my grandfather worked up in his job, and sent their sons to the University of Notre Dame—the eighth wonder of the world for American Catholics,” he said.

Fisher’s talk was part of Arts and Sciences Faculty Day. This year, honorees included
Christopher Aubin, Ph.D., associate professor of physics, who was honored for excellence in teaching in science and math;

Jim Fisher, Ph.D.,professor of theology, who was honored for or excellence in teaching in arts and humanities

Christina Greer, Ph.D., associate professor of political science, who was honored for excellence in teaching social sciences;

Maryann Kowaleski, P.h.D., Joseph Fitzpatrick SJ Distinguished Professor of History and Medieval Studies, who was honored for excellence in teaching in graduate studies.

The evening also celebrates 12 members of the arts and science faculty who have been chosen to work together to discuss innovative teaching techniques. The group, which includes graduate students and cuts across campuses and disciplines, meets five times a semester for two semesters to share recent scholarship in the field of teaching stories, and techniques. This year’s cohort includes:

Emanuel Fiano, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology

Abby Goldstein, associate professor of visual arts

Henry Han, Ph.D., associate professor of Computer and Information Science

Carey Kasten, Ph.D., associate professor of Spanish

Christopher Koenigsmann, Ph.D., assistant professor of chemistry

Jesus Luzardo, Ph.D. candidate of philosophy, Graduate School of Arts and Science

Jason Morris, Ph.D, associate professor of biology

Meenaserani Murugan, Ph.D., assistant professor of communications

Silvana Patriarca, Ph.D., professor of history

Kathryn Reklis, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology

Margaret Schwartz, Ph.D., associate professor of communications

Richard Teverson, assistant professor of art history

Dennis Tyler, Ph.D., assistant professor of English

Alessia Valfredini, Ph.D., lecturer of Italian

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $113,000 grant for the acquisition of a high-resolution atomic force microscope for interdisciplinary nanoscience research. With chemistry professor Ipsita A. Banerjee, PhD, as principal investigator, a group of faculty from the departments of biological sciences, physics and engineering, and chemistry cooperated on the grant to obtain equipment which they will share.

“This award is really exciting, especially since the NSF’s Major Research Instrumentation Program only funds about one-fourth of the applications it receives, and this is the second MRI award we’ve gotten in two years.” said Kris Wolff, director of the Office of Sponsored Programs. The 2015 grant, for a liquid-handling robot, went to Jason Munshi-South’s lab in the biological sciences department.

The Russo family has provided more than $180,000 in funding towards purchasing a scanning electron microscope (SEM). Robert D. Russo, MD, FCRH ’69, is a member of the University’s President’s Council and Fordham’s Science Council, which aims to promote science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in part by modernizing the University’s technological capabilities.

The gift honors Russo’s father, Robert D. Russo, Sr., MD, FCRH ’39, and Louis R. Del Guercio, MD, FCRH ’49. Dr. Russo refers to his two predecessors as “physicians for others.”

“A donation like this has a ripple effect,” said Robert Beer, PhD, chair of the chemistry department. “We were able to get the instrument, which attracted a new faculty member, and it shows that we’re an institution that is serious about upgrading technology and research.”

In addition, by trading in an older instrument, the University received a donation from the pharmaceutical company Roche and a $40,000 grant from TA Instruments, and was able to purchase a thermal gravimetric analyzer and rheometer. This summer the department also acquired an X-ray powder diffractometer at a cost of nearly $120,000.

Christopher Koenigsmann, PhD, assistant professor of chemistry, said that the new resources will help further distinguish Fordham’s research capabilities.

The SEM uses electrons rather than visible light. As typical wavelengths of visible light are 400 to 800 nanometers, said Koenigsmann, light microscopes cannot perceive an object, for example, that is two nanometers. The electron microscope’s much smaller wavelengths allow it to perceive objects with diameters as small as one to two nanometers—equivalent to the diameter of double helix strand of DNA.

The X-ray powder diffractometer looks at material composed of small crystallites. The instrument detects the material’s elements and how they are organized in the crystal structure.

“It’s a tremendously powerful instrument and it’s one of the essential characterization tools in chemistry,” said Koenigsmann.

He said that his lab is involved in a few projects to examine renewable energy technology. He is interested in increasing the cost-effectiveness and performance of solar cells and fuel cells in order to harness the energy of sunlight.

“In nanotechnology, synthesis is important,” he said. “But what’s equally important is being able to characterize the properties and be able figure out exactly what you have.”