From the vaccination rollout to the constitutionality of the former president's impeachment trial, DePaul faculty in the 2020-21 OpEd Project cohort are making themselves heard. So far, the current cohort has placed more than 30 op-ed articles with national news outlets, including “The Washington Post" and “Scientific American."
“The OpEd Project is an exciting professional development opportunity for faculty who want to share their research and expertise with the broader public," says Carolyn Bronstein, associate dean and Vincent de Paul professor in the College of Communication and founding director of DePaul's OpEd Project. “This fellowship teaches participants to apply their knowledge to the most pressing issues of our times, from climate change to immigration, racism, homelessness, voting rights and addiction."
Launched in 2012-13, the Public Voices Fellowship program aims to provide a diverse group of scholars with the resources, support and skills needed to increase their influence as thought leaders in their fields. As fellows, faculty receive dedicated editorial support from an OpEd Project mentor, collaborate with fellow cohort members to brainstorm ideas and attend multiple seminars.
“The OpEd project is an amazing opportunity for faculty to learn how to engage in public dialogues on important topics," says Craig Klugman, professor health sciences and faculty director of the OpEd Project. “As a former fellow, the project gave me tools to be a successful public writer on issues such as racism in medicine, vaccine distribution and pandemic response. Seeing our new fellows fulfill their promise makes me proud and honored to be part of the DePaul OpEd family."
Despite this year's program taking place completely virtually due to COVID-19, the 2020-21 cohort is demonstrating plenty of momentum.
“The role of faculty in higher education is increasingly shifting toward a more public model, with public intellectualism comprising an important and lasting aspect of one's professional trajectory," Bronstein says. “I'm proud that we recognized this trend early on at DePaul and have made the OpEd Project fellowship program available to five cohorts since 2012-13."
A list of the 2020-21 cohort's published works is available on the College of Communication website. Keep an eye on Newsline's DePaul in the News section for the latest published pieces. The Public Voices Fellowship is sponsored by
Academic Affairs and the College of Communication’s Center for Communication
Engagement.
Get to know the 2020-21 cohort via the interactive gallery below:
Carolina Barrera-Tobon, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Read more Carolina Barrera-Tobon is an assistant professor iof modern languages and the coordinator of the Heritage Language Program in the Spanish Program. She co-directs the Bilingual Language Development Lab and is a part of the Chicago Branch of the Bilingualism Matters International Network, dedicated to connecting parents, teachers and community members with experts in order to help combat myths about bilingualism and bilingual education.
Her most recent research highlights the benefits of early childhood bilingualism for children from minority language backgrounds, as well as monolingual English backgrounds. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, bilingualism, language acquisition, the Spanish in the U.S., and the application and intersection of these fields within education.
Paul Booth, College of Communication
Read more Paul Booth is a professor of media and cinema studies in the College of Communication. He received his Ph.D. in communication and rhetoric from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He researches fandom, games, technology, popular culture and cultural studies. He teaches classes in media studies, television narrative, board games, popular culture and communication technology.
Booth is the author or editor of more than 10 books, including most recently: "Board Games as Media" (Bloomsbury, 2021); "Watching Doctor Who" (Bloomsbury, 2019); the "Wiley Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies" (Wiley, 2018); "Crossing Fandoms: SuperWhoLock and the Contemporary Fan Audience" (Palgrave, 2016); and "Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games" (2015, Bloomsbury). He also has published more than 30 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters.
Booth is also the organizer of the annual DePaul Pop Culture Conference, at which fans and scholars come together in thoughtful discussion of popular culture texts.
Kate R. Cooper, College of Communication
Read more Katherine R. Cooper is an assistant professor of communication studies at DePaul. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her main research interest focuses on how organizations collaborate in response to social challenges, in particular, how nonprofits and community members are represented in these efforts.
Her research on nonprofit collaboration has appeared in Community Development, Management Communication Quarterly, Nonprofit Management and Leadership, and Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, as well as the Stanford Social Innovation Review and Nonprofit Quarterly. She is the co-author of the forthcoming book, Networks for
Social Impact.
Colleen Doody, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Read more Colleen Doody an associate professor and associate chair in the Department of History. She is a historian of the U.S. in the 20th century.
Her research focuses on labor, history of capitalism and Chicago. Doody currently is writing a book on the history of capitalism in Chicago, which she explores through the lens of the candy industry.
Wendy Netter Epstein, College of Law
Read more Wendy Netter Epstein is a professor of law and faculty director of DePaul's Jaharis Health Law Institute. Her teaching and research focus on health care law and policy, with an emphasis on the financing and delivery of health care, and the creative application of behavioral economic principles to entrenched problems.
Her scholarship utilizes an interdisciplinary approach. Her work has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in the Southern California Law Review; Minnesota Law Review; Emory Law Journal; Washington Law Review; and Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics. She also is a frequent contributor to media, blogs and Op-Eds on issues of health industry importance.
Epstein has received both the Faculty Scholarship and Faculty Teaching Awards. She received her bachelor’s from the University of Illinois, and her J.D. from Harvard Law School. Prior to coming to DePaul, she clerked for the Hon. Michael Daly Hawkins, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, and was a partner in commercial litigation at Kirkland and Ellis.
Fereshteh Ghahramani, College of Computing and Digital Media
Read more Fereshteh Ghahramani is an assistant professor in the College of Computing and Digital Media at DePaul. She received her Ph.D. in management information systems from the University of Texas - Arlington.
Her primary research interests include behavioral information security and healthcare IT. Her work has been published in Information Systems Frontiers, International Conference on Information Systems, and Americas Conference on Information Systems.
Caroline Kisiel, School of Continuing and Professional Studies
Read more Caroline Kisiel is a public historian and humanities scholar with expertise in literary history, travel writing, creativity and cultural studies. Having presented and published a range of works in these fields, the primary focus of her current research centers on the settling of Albion, Illinois, in the early years of Illinois statehood.
Kisiel has published about the founding of Albion in the Journal of Illinois History (2015), in an essay on 1820s antislavery activist, Frances Wright, who had ties with Albion. She currently is writing a scholarly book on the antislavery activism of Albion, Illinois, with the University of Illinois Press.
A Road Scholar with Illinois Humanities, Kisiel offers public programs to Illinois residents on this topic. With the Wheaton Public Library (2020), she collaborated on community engagement programming for area residents on race, privilege, identity, community concerns, and Illinois history. She was the featured historian for the City of Albion Bicentennial (2018), and her research on slavery in early Illinois was featured in the Ask an Expert series in DePaul University Newsline (2018).
Helen LaVan, Driehaus College of Business
Read more Helen LaVan is a professor of management in the Driehaus College of Business. She teaches human resource management and career development. Her areas of expertise are employee relations, including bullying and workplace violence, employment discrimination and arbitration. She holds a Ph.D. from Loyola University, an MBA from DePaul and a master's in career counseling from Northeastern Illinois University.
LaVan is a licensed counselor and has assisted in the development of over 4,000 resumes. She is a former chair of the management education and
development division of the Academy of Management, recipient of the University faculty service award, and the Wicklander fellowship for business ethics research. She is the 2010 and 2020 recipient of the Spirit of Inquiry award.
She has consulted with various private and nonprofit sector organizations, and family-owned businesses on human resource selection and training. She is particularly concerned about workplace justice and individuals discriminated against on various bases, including race, sex and obesity.
Austin Lim, College of Science and Health
Read more Austin Lim is an instructor in the College of Science and Health. His main interest in neuroscience is understanding the functions of the striatum, a critical area of the brain important for processing rewards, control of movement and cognition.
As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, his research was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. His postdoctoral research at Northwestern was supported by the Cure Huntington’s Disease Initiative. The research he has done towards understanding the activity of cells within the striatum has been published in academic journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences and Neurobiology of Disease.
Lim also has contributed as an author at Helix Magazine through Northwestern University and Science Unsealed through the Illinois Science Council.
Tracey Mabrey, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Read more Tracey Mabrey is an associate professor and chair of DePaul's Social Work program. She is a graduate of Howard University, having received both her MSW and DSW degrees from HU.
Mabrey joined DePaul in 2003 to begin development of the MSW degree program. She facilitated the initial accreditation of the program and its first national ranking. She has published and presented broadly in the areas of social work accreditation, the scrutiny of African-American girls, and social work education and practice. Most recently, her works have examined the experiences of mature African-American women and micro aggressions during the current era.
Mabrey has reviewed manuscripts for professional journals, as well as contributed content and direction to national, professional conferences which centered on faculty development, curriculum building, and educational administration. Currently, Mabrey is working on one manuscript which explores why emotional labor may be different for social work educators.
Greg Mark is a professor in the College of Law. Mark’s scholarship concerns the legal history of the political economy, especially the legal history of the American business corporation.
In recent years, the place of the business corporation in society has become especially controversial. The corporation's legal status has moved to the forefront of those controversies. His work on the personification of the corporation is recognized as one of the two pieces that undergird the current debate.
Mark's other professional experience, coming out of his time as an Iran/Contra prosecutor in the earlier stages of his career and as an academic administrator in the later stages of his career, have served as bases for press commentary. Recently, when the intersection of law enforcement and national security has become more prominent, he has been asked to work with others in the field, including the former counsel to the 9/11 Commission, on contemporary issues.
Susana Martínez, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Read more Susana S. Martínez is an associate professor in the Department of Modern Languages, where teaches Spanish, and Latin American and Latinx Literature. She also is the director of DePaul's Peace, Justice and Conflict Program Studies program. She studied at the University of California - Los Angeles and Yale University. Her research focuses on the representation of violence and lived experiences in Central American and Mexican literature and popular culture.
Martínez is working on a book on the depiction of child migration from Central America and Mexico to the U.S. in young adult literature. She has published articles on the Paraguayan author Augusto Roa Bastos, travel narratives to Guatemala, the ethnographic memoir by Cuban American writer Ruth Behar, reality television and crime novels.
She has written three book chapters on young adult literature that focus on political violence and resisting injustice. Her book review, "Documenting Limbo: Undocumented Life Narratives" in Latino Studies highlights the contributions of two monographs to larger debates on immigration. Her chapter "Learning about Archbishop Oscar Romero in the Special Collections Archives" has been accepted for publication in the anthology Teaching Central American Literature in a Global Context.
Hamed Qahri-Saremi, College of Computing and Digital Media
Read more Hamed Qahri-Saremi is an assistant professor of information systems in the College of Computing and Digital Media. He teaches courses related to enterprise systems analysis and implementation, data science and research methods. His research areas are at the intersection of social and technological systems, with a focus on the positive and negative impacts of social digital technologies, computer-mediated communications and social media on users, organizations and society.
He investigates the antecedents and consequences of problematic, unsafe, risky, unfaithful and compulsive uses of social technologies that can lead to adverse consequences for users, organizations, and societies. He studies these issues from multiple perspectives, including cognitive psychology, users' personality, situational conditions, as well as organizational and societal policies.
His papers in these areas have appeared in top academic journals in Information Systems and Communication, such as the Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, Information and Management, and New Media and Society.
Maija Renko, Driehaus College of Business
Read more Maija Renko is professor and Coleman Chair of Entrepreneurship in the Driehaus College of Business. She received her DSc degree from Turku School of Economics, and a Ph.D. in business administration from Florida International University.
Renko teaches entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship. Her research and teaching interests are focused on the early stages of the entrepreneurial process, and social and technology entrepreneurship. Her research has been published in leading management and entrepreneurship journals, and she currently serves on the editorial board of the two premier entrepreneurship journals: Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice. Renko has received a number of grants to support her research activities, and students voted her to be their Favorite MBA Professor in 2013.
Her teaching and research contribute to a better understanding of how entrepreneurs build successful businesses that not only generate financial rewards for those involved, but also contribute to positive social change, a sense of achievement for those involved, and the advancement of society through the introduction of innovations.
Monica Reyes, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Read more Monica Reyes is an assistant professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s from the University of Texas - Brownsville, and her Ph.D. in English studies from Old Dominion University.
Living along the southern border allowed her to volunteer for many years with people seeking asylum at a local shelter. This experience opened up research opportunities and taught her about systemic inequalities in asylum policy, especially prevalent in the demand for narratives within asylum applications. Her scholarship led to an ongoing initiative for writing teachers to help people seeking asylum with the written portion of their asylum claim. While completing her Ph.D., she taught at The University of Texas - Rio Grande Valley, located on the national border where the majority of asylum claims are made. Teaching on the border allowed her to design service-learning courses that culminated in students creating promotional materials for local agencies that work with displaced populations.
Her teaching was recognized in 2019-20 with the highly selective University of Texas System Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award. Her scholarship has featured most recently in Postcolonial Text (2019), Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing and Culture (2020) and is forthcoming in the edited collection Grassroots Activisms: Public Rhetorics in Localized Contexts (2021).
Ida Salusky, College of Science and Health
Read more Ida Salusky is an assistant professor of clinical-community psychology. She received her Ph.D. in clinical-community psychology from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and completed her clinical internship at Yale University. Her research focuses on issues of social and gender innequality in both the U.S. and the Dominican Republic.
Currently, she conducts longitudinal research examining educational equity for historically underrepresented populations in U.S. institutions of higher education. She also examines responses to structural violence and state sponsored discrimination of females of Haitian descent living in the Dominican Republic.
She teaches graduate seminars in community psychology, clinical ethics and qualitative methods. In addition to her teaching and research, she is active in coalition work to develop an integrated network of mental healthcare care for immigrant and refugee populations in the city of Chicago.
Daniel Schober, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Read more Daniel Schober is an assistant professor in the Master of Public Health program. His area of research examines health disparities brought on by violence and chronic disease. His research on violence prevention has involved partnerships with federal, state and local partners to document the effects of statewide child sexual abuse initiatives, build capacity for preventing domestic violence and evaluate an adaptation of ceasefire in Kansas City, Missouri.
Schober currently is finishing research with Sinai Urban Health Institute, where he is the lead author on black-white disparities in homicide and suicide across the biggest U.S. cities. This academic year he leads the Chicago Gun Violence Research Collaborative. The collaborative is a group of professors and public health professionals working with graduate student from universities across Chicago to conduct gun violence research in collaboration with local organizations and neighborhoods most affected by the issue.
Kelly Tzoumis, College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences
Read more Kelly Tzoumis is a professor in the School of Public Service. Her research fields include environmental policy, public policy and public administration.
Her education background includes a BS in the distributed fields of chemistry, microbiology and zoology; an MPA in environmental policy; and a Ph.D. in public policy and administration in the field of environmental policy.
Before entering academia, she worked for several years in the national laboratories and with the U.S. Department of Energy. She served as an IPA Congressional Fellow for US Senator Simon on Capitol Hill.
In 2003, she was awarded the Distinguished Chair in Environmental Studies by Fulbright. She has published many articles, some with students as authors on environmental policy, along with two books. She has received awards for teaching, advising and course design. She works with global partners in nine countries and four continents for the GLE at DePaul. She is also actively involved with advocacy for learners with disabilities with an AGIF and FLC at DePaul.
Tawei "David" Wang, Driehaus College of Business
Read more Tawei "David" Wang is an associate professor and Driehaus Fellow at DePaul. He received his Ph.D. from Krannert Graduate School of Management at Purdue University. His research interests are information security management and IT management.
His papers have appeared in several leading journals, including Information Systems Research, Accounting Horizons, Decision Support Systems, European Journal of Information Systems, Information and Management, and Information Systems Journal, among others. He received several research awards and currently is the second most productive researcher in accounting information systems archival research based on the Brigham Young University ranking. His articles have been downloaded more than 39,000 times through the Science Direct network.
He mainly teaches audit data analytics and data mining, and has been invited by universities and conferences to discuss data analytics. He was a speaker and panelist for the Institute of Internal Auditors, Institute of Management Accountants and the Federal Reserve Bank. He was selected to be the KPMG James Marwick Professor in Residence in 2018 and currently is the American Accounting Association Midwest Region President.
Christopher Worthman, College of Education
Read more Christopher Worthman is a professor in the College of Education and in his 22nd year at DePaul. Prior to joining the university, he taught for a number of years in Chicago public and private middle and high schools.
In his more than 20 years of scholarly work, his research has evolved, but not diverged, from an interest in writing as emancipatory practice and how best to teach writing with that end in mind. He has published in national and international journals on topics as diverse as critical literacy, adult education, community-based theatre, English as a medium of instruction, and magical realism and trauma narratives. These publications include a book, 20 articles and chapters, and 28 referee-selected national and international presentations.
He is now immersed in trauma studies as it relates to literary analysis and the use of magical realism as a therapeutic response to trauma for both authors and readers, speakers and listeners. This work is in its nascent stages, but has led to one publication. He has also written two middle grade novels and received a Faculty Recognition Grant to prepare these manuscripts for publication. Both novels use magical realism to explore traumatic narratives around environmental destruction, wildlife protection, homelessness and transgender awareness.