For the Record provides information about recent professional activities and honors of University of Delaware faculty, staff, students and alumni.

Recent presentations, awards and publications include the following:

Presentations

Trevor A. Dawes, the vice provost for libraries and museums and May Morris University Librarian, was an invited lecturer at the Kyoto College of Graduate Studies for Informatics (Kyoto Computer Gakuin, KCG) in Kyoto, Japan, in May 2024. Dawes’ lecture focused on the importance of libraries in today’s digital age. Dawes also spoke about the value of intellectual property in advancing research and scholarship and how libraries have been places to provide space for conversations and action toward resolving the tension that often exists between EDI efforts and intellectual freedom. 

The 37th Meaningful Economics Competition, which brings together students in third through fifth grade classrooms around Delaware, took place May 21-23 in Newark and May 20 in Georgetown. The event is hosted by the Center for Economic Education and Entrepreneurship (CEEE), part of UD’s Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics, and sponsored by the Delaware Council on Economic Education, Discover Bank and Bank of America. Volunteers come from Sussex County government, the sponsoring banks and others including M&T Bank and JP Morgan Chase. Community members also participate, like former teachers who return year after year to help judge. Third, fourth and fifth grades each get a day to compete, with typically more than 100 students attending each day. All told, more than 400 participated this year from 19 schools. CEEE founded the event in 1987 to promote economic education among Delaware students. Read the full article on the Lerner College website.

Awards 

Lauren Covington, assistant professor in the School of Nursing in the College of Health Sciences, is one of 16 nurse scientists accepted to the fifth cohort of the Betty Irene Moore Fellowship for Nurse Leaders and Innovators. This fellowship program recognizes early- to mid-career nursing scholars and innovators with a high potential to accelerate leadership in nursing research, practice, education, policy and entrepreneurship. As part of the three-year fellowship program, fellows receive $450,000 to conduct an innovative project or study with the potential to address a gap in knowledge, meet a vital need, alter care delivery or design a new solution to advance health. Covington’s project focuses on understanding and addressing sleep and health inequities among disadvantaged families. She aims to leverage evidence from this research to support the investment in policies by community, coalition and legislative members that will provide better conditions and support the implementation of health behaviors for disadvantaged families. 

Amy Bleakley, professor of communication, and Claire Wanzer, a doctoral student in communication, were one of three research teams named Innovations in Research and Practice Grant recipients by the NCAA. The award recognizes projects that look to understand and improve student-athletes’ psychosocial well-being and mental health. Bleakley and Wanzer’s research focuses on the impact of social media on student athletes, with the goal of developing data-driven digital well-being strategies. The team will collaborate with student athletes at UD, as well as athletes from Division I programs at Binghamton University and Niagara University and Division II programs at West Chester University and Daemen University. Wanzer is the project director and will begin conducting focus groups this summer.  

The University of Delaware has been named to the 2024 PRNews Education A-List, which recognizes the best college and university programs for training future public relations and communications professionals. The list represents the “most innovative higher learning institutions for PR and communications,” according to Kaylee Hultgren, content director for the public relations services company. The Department of Communication’s undergraduate public relations concentration and online master’s in Strategic Communication programs were honored. The department offers two research-based graduate degrees in communication, a professional online strategic communication master’s degree and an undergraduate major with concentrations in media communication, interpersonal communication and public relations, as well as a number of minors. This is the second year in a row that UD has been named to the Education A-List.

Publications

Amanda Convery, assistant professor of accounting, was quoted in a Bloomberg Tax article about the Financial Accounting Standards Board internal handbook, Conceptual Framework. “When accounting problems come up and there’s circumstances we need to have answers for, it really begins with these definitions,” Convery said.

Margaret Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and professor of humanities, continues to publish poetry that reflects her scholarship and teaching interests, in order to bring these subjects to new audiences. Her poem "Radclyffe Hall" — dedicated to the British author of The Well of Loneliness (1928) — has appeared in Vol. 67 (2024) of Spectrum Literary Journal, which is published by the College of Creative Studies, UC Santa Barbara. Also, her "Tanka: For Virginia Woolf" was published in Cattails Journal (Ottawa, Canada), in its April 2024 issue. In addition, she contributed to the "Footnote" column of the "Daily Briefing" online newsletter of the Chronicle of Higher Education, on May 30, 2024, offering an account of how her future writing was influenced by a comment she received about her M. A. thesis at the University of Sussex (UK) in 1975.

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