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Dalia Chowdhury, Rehabilitation and Health Services

In the U.S., almost 28 million women over the age of five, or 22% of the total female population have some form of disability. Additionally, women have a significantly higher incidence of disability compared with men at all ages: 25.4% vs. 19.1%. These numbers make women the single largest demography with physical, and/or chronic disabilities. But, disability is not just a physical condition, it is a socio-economic and political hurdle for women with disabilities (WWDs).  Therefore, it is not surprising that even though WWDs have some of the highest health care utilization and expenditures than all other demographic categories combined; yet, they experience significant medical disparities in accessing desired preventative healthcare services. The lack of such preventative care results in greater risk of exacerbating preventable health conditions into life threatening comorbid chronic diseases, such as hypertension, osteoporosis, diabetes, obesity, and heart disease in addition to the primary disabling conditions. Most WWDs are covered by Medicaid; however, research shows that WWDs often lack access to required medical services and equipment due to structural, environmental and cultural barriers, even when protected by Medicaid. The first generation of disability research has mainly focused on listing of barriers, but what has remained critically unaddressed is the extent to which these barriers are delaying the “unmet need” of services.“Unmet needs” are defined as the “invisible factors that may significantly affect health and well-being but that go undetected and unattended by the formal healthcare system”. The current project will begin to address this gap in literature, by asking the following questions: a. When compared to men with disabilities and women without disabilities, do WWDs experience greater unmet needs? b. What do disability service providers need to know about the unmet needs of WWDs?

 To learn more, please contact Dalia Chowdhury at Dalia.Chowdhury@unt.edu.

Andrew Colombo-Dougovito, Kinesiology, Health Promotion and Recreation

Building the Foundational Knowledge to Support the Development of an Adapted Physical Activity Program at UNT

The purpose of the present project is to create a collaborative relationship with two leading US universities in the field of adapted physical activity—the University of Virginia (UVA) and Oregon State University (OSU)—and the University of North Texas. Building on the expertise of Drs. Martin Block (UVA) and Megan MacDonald (OSU) in the field of providing physical activity services to individuals with disabilities, Dr. Andrew Colombo-Dougovito will cultivate foundational knowledge to build a graduate program in the field of adapted physical activity, develop a research laboratory (the Disability & Movement Research Collective) and expand the current offerings of the UNT Physical Activity & Motor Skill (UNT-PAMS) program. The area of physical activity for individuals with disabilities is underserved in the DFW metroplex and beyond. Through research and practical experiences, undergraduate and graduate students at UNT will gain hands-on experience working with individuals with disabilities. Further, through UNT-PAMS programing, individuals with disabilities across the lifespan will be able to gain the skills and strategies necessary to lead more physically active lives.
To learn more, please contact Dr. Andrew M. Colombo-Dougovito at andrew.colombo-dougovito@unt.edu. 

Christy Crutsinger, Merchandising and Digital Retailing

Retooling:  When the Mentor Becomes the Mentee

Trends such as channel polarity, experiential storytelling, ubiquitous digital, and engagement choreography were nonexistent in the retail/fashion industry when I transitioned from faculty to central administration approximately a decade ago. The purpose of this micro-mentoring grant is to provide structure and support for my retooling journey. Employing a Speed to Market tactic, this project leverages both external and internal mentor networks to inform my teaching and research.

Formal industry training will occur through the completion of non-credit coursework offered by the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Courses will include Predictive Analytics for Retail and Fashion, Omni-Channel Merchandising & Buying, Insider's Guide to Tracking Trends and Fundamentals of Online Retailing. During my NY immersion study experience, I will interview UNT merchandising graduates (Roxanne Paschall, Senior Vice President for Salvatore Ferragamo and Djenaba Johnson Jones, President and CEO of Hudson Kitchen). These mentoring relationships will extend beyond the initial site visit and continue throughout the course of the semester via email and Skype. The goal is to use the interview transcripts and follow-up conversations to jumpstart my research agenda focusing on leadership development in the retail/fashion industry. To bring the mentoring process full circle, I will with closely with UNT faculty mentors, Michelle Burton, Sanjukta Pookulangara, and Marissa Zorola, former students who are now colleagues. Through peer classroom observations and brown bag lunches, I hope to leverage their knowledge to create stellar classroom experiences that improve overall student learning. Indeed, the mentor is now the mentee.

Are you stepping into a new role?  If you need to reboot, retool, or restart your academic career, please contact Christy Crutsinger at christyc@unt.edu to start a conversation and develop a transition strategy.

Nora Gilbert, English

Last year, UNT was invited to become a member of the Dickens Project Consortium. The chief goal of this prestigious consortium is to promote research on the life, work, and times of Charles Dickens and to bring the results of this research before both a scholarly audience and the general public. The marquee event of the Dickens Project is its annual, week-long summer Research Institute at the University of California, Santa Cruz called "Dickens Universe" that brings faculty, students, and members of the general public together to discuss one of Dickens's major works. As an institutional member of the consortium, we are required to send one faculty member and one graduate student to the institute per year, and this mentoring grant will help fund my attendance in the Summer of 2020. While the mentoring benefits for the graduate students we send may be the most apparent—they get to attend a wide variety of professionalization talks and seminars, get experience teaching the undergraduate and non-academic attendees of the conference, and get to meet many of the biggest names in Victorian literary studies up close and personal over the course of the week—the mentoring benefits for faculty members are quite robust as well. Personally, I know many people working in the field of Victorian Studies who have developed ideas for collaborative projects (essay collections, special issues, conference panels, etc.) during their week together at Dickens Universe. In particular, I plan to discuss my current book-in-progress, Gone Girls: The Runaway Woman Narrative in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, with some of the very scholars whose ideas I am responding to in the course of the project, and know that their feedback will be invaluable as I enter into the final stages of the writing process.

To learn more, please contact Nora Gilbert at Nora.Gilbert@unt.edu.

Aleshia Hayes, Learning Technologies

This project is to visit the labs of two mentors and potential collaborators from another institution, Clemson University. I will visit Dr. Babu, an Associate Professor of Computer Science, and his mentor Dr. Larry Hodges, a renowned VR research Professor.  These mentors currently lead the Clemson University has a Virtual Environments Group funded by the National Science Foundation and local foundations.  This research group at Clemson University has to goals to “imagine, design, build and evaluate software and technology for a variety of virtual environment applications”. This aligns with my goal to create a lab for Virtual/Immersive Learning Environments group here at UNT. Further, the collaboration with Andrew Robb, Assistant professor in Computer Science there is meant to yield the design of a collaborative class in which UNT Learning Technology students can work with Clemson CS students to create virtual learning experiences. Not only does this give our students more experience collaborating, it also has the potential to yield long term collaboration across states. Ideally, this could also inform the industry as a best practice in collaboration across levels from undergraduate, graduate, to faculty.

To learn more, please contact Aleshia Hayes at Aleshia.Hayes@unt.edu.

Kate Imy, History

The Gendered Environments of War

This project will build networks between and promote the research of women working in military history. Many women have emerged as leaders in the study of military history and “war and society” yet many still feel—or are treated—like interlopers in the field. This micro-grant attempts to foreground the significant contributions of women in military history by bringing together several scholars at various career stages to present their ground-breaking research, provide feedback for publications, and to develop lasting networks at the Berkshire Conference for Women Historians. The so-called “Big Berks” is a triennial international conference that provides a forum for women scholars. UNT Assistant Professor Kate Imy will co-present with scholars on a panel entitled “The Gendered Environments of War.” The panel will be chaired by Professor Antoinette Burton, an Endowed Professor at the University of Illinois. The other panelists are emerging leaders in the fields of military history and war and society. Allison Abra is the endowed Nina B. Suggs professor at the University of Southern Mississippi. Amy Milne-Smith is an Associate Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University. At the conference, these scholars will develop mentoring networks with other women working on military history by discussing research, teaching, and future collaboration initiatives on war and society.

To learn more, please contact Dr. Kate Imy at kate.imy@unt.edu

Nazia Khan, Teacher Education and Administration

The purpose of the grant is to enhance students' content and pedagogy knowledge with practicum opportunities for pre-service teachers in the areas of mathematics education and science education by providing real-life and hands-on experiences outside the classroom.  Collaborative efforts with Sci-Tech Discovery Center located in North Texas will help to create a more cohesive experience for pre-service teachers in STEM education. This mentoring grant will assist in the research of advancing student's understanding of new age technologies in the classroom. The purpose of this project is to focus on improving teaching using various manipulatives to build meaningful learning environments for pre-service teachers at the University of North Texas and to prepare the next generation of highly qualified science and math teachers by allowing them to experience learning through discovery.

The intended outcome is a guiding conceptual framework as well as outline detailed goals, objectives, student involvement, and integrating best STEM practices with Dr. Pamela Harrell's guidance. With this theme in mind, the target goal for the project include developing and implementing a research agenda around using outside classroom techniques (Discovery center) to implement the standards and proposing research questions and implications within the scholarly literature through attending specialized conferences, presentations, and meetings with field experts.This project on building out-of- classroom experiences of pre-service mathematics and science education students at the University of North Texas allows underrepresented students the opportunity to visit discovery centers with new and modern equipment.

To learn more, please contact Nazia Khan at Nazia.Khan@unt.edu.

Minhong Kim, Kinesiology, Health Promotion and Recreation

Two Birds with One Stone in Mentoring through Conference Attendance

The purpose of the present project is to create a bidirectional collaborative mentorship opportunity with faculty mentor and protégé. Dr. James J. Zhang is a professor and coordinator of the sport management program in the Department of Kinesiology and the director of the International Center for Sport Management (ICSM) at the University of Georgia. He is a renowned scholar in the field of sport management with more than 200 refereed journal publications, books, and book chapters and more than 400 research presentations. He also produced numerous doctoral and master's students who now serve as researchers and professionals in the sport industry. After receiving a Ph.D. degree under his guidance, I am assisting him with mentoring visiting scholars and doctoral and master's students on research projects as a colleague. We, as a research team, are currently working on several research projects. Attending international and national conferences with Dr. Zhang and protégés will help me further enhance my research competencies by developing our future research agenda, seeking for external grant opportunities, and increasing research collaborations with sport management scholars and experts. This project will also allow me to improve my teaching skills and capabilities not only as an instructor but also as a successful mentor by acquiring best practices in mentorship from Dr. Zhang and exercising such practices for my students at UNT.

To learn more, please contact Dr. Minhong Kim at Minhong.Kim@unt.edu.

Daniella Smith, Information Science

Legislation such as Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) places technology at the forefront of school reform. ESSA is of particular importance to the education and school library communities because the legislation acknowledges the role of school libraries in using technology to prepare students to be career and college ready. Moreover, school librarianship standards and literature emphasize technological competence. It is evident that technology skills are a vital aspect of school librarianship preparation that must be taught during coursework. UNT offers an accredited, nationally ranked, school librarianship program. The program currently has over 300 students. Therefore, funding has been requested to update my technology skills by completing the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Certification course and the Texas Computer Education Association (TCEA) Technology Acceleration Academy. The information learned during these professional development opportunities will be used to revise course content.

To learn more, please contact Daniella Smith at Daniella.Smith@unt.edu.

Hua Sun, Electrical Engineering

An Information Theoretic Approach to Big-Data Privacy

This project aims at studying the fundamental limits of communication costs of a privacy preserving primitive under the context of modern information systems. The primitive to be studied in this project is Private Information Retrieval: to understand how to efficiently retrieve data without revealing the identifying information of the data. The primitive is to be designed under information-theoretic security guarantees. Our goal is: 1) to characterize the fundamental performance limits, and 2) to design practical codes based on the insights revealed by the fundamental performance limits characterization. In addition to the research plan, this project will also produce accessible lecture contents on information theoretic privacy for graduate students and preliminary research problems for motivated undergraduate students through cooperation with the Undergraduate Research Fellow program. This project will be carried out in collaboration with Dr. Chao Tian from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University.

To learn more about this project, please contact Dr. Hua Sun at hua.sun@unt.edu.

Justin Watts, Rehabilitation and Health Services

The purpose of this project is to enhance skills in statistical analysis in order to address several research projects that require advanced statistical analysis. I will be attending a 5-day workshop on Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) taught by statistician Dr. Paul Allison from the University of Pennsylvania. The workshop will involve (a) Introduction to SEM, (b) Path analysis, (c) Direct and indirect effects, (d) Bootstrapping in SEM, (e) Nonrecursive models (f) Instrumental variables, (g) Reliability and validity, (h) Multiple indicators of latent variables, (i) Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, and (j) Structural relations among latent variables. These skills will translate into several research projects being conducted this summer on child-maltreatment (CM). The Centers for Disease Control [CDC] has identified mechanisms by which the experience of CM influences health and well-being through the lifespan. The experience of early adversity typically leads to interrupted neurodevelopment, social emotional and cognitive deficiency, the assumption of health-risk behaviors (i.e. substance use, risky sexual behaviors), which typically lead to disability, disease, and social problems, and ultimately decreased life expectancy. Research related to CM has mostly focused on the experience of these adversities, adoption of health risk behaviors and the negative health outcomes associated with these behaviors. Little research has been done examining why individuals with CM histories experience these deficits in multiple life domains. The Substance Use and Mental Health Services Administration [SAMHSA] (2018) has emphasized a large gap in the research related to social, emotional and cognitive impairment. As such, the purpose of this research is to examine CM in the context of how adult survivors relate to these experiences internally. It is anticipated that these findings will influence clinical practice, and enhance interventions for individuals experience negative health outcomes as a result of CM.

For more information, please contact Justin Watts at Justin.Watts@unt.edu