Noteworthy: Research grants, awards and publications

ALBANY, N.Y. (Sept. 26, 2024) — The latest developments on University at Albany faculty and staff who are receiving research grants, awards and other noteworthy attention.

• Battulga Buyannemekh, a PhD student in Rockefeller College’s Department of Public Administration and Policy, received a Samuels Doctoral Fellowship from Baruch College to support research for his dissertation, which looks at how county governments in New York State strategize information technology to improve public services and streamline operations. The fellowship supports doctoral students conducting research focused on New York state and local policy.
• David Yun Dai, a professor in the School of Education’s Department of Educational & Counseling Psychology, was selected to deliver the keynote speech at the World Council for Gifted and Talented Children’s biennial conference happening July 29-Aug. 2, 2025. More than 500 participants from 40 countries are expected to attend the conference in Braga, Portugal and share research in the field of gifted studies and talent development. Dai will discuss gifted education in the age of AI.
• Paolo Forni, associate professor of Biological Sciences, was awarded $1.6 million from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to support his research on Kallmann syndrome and normosmic forms of idiopathic hypogonadotropic hypogonadism. The work aims to improve diagnostics and advance therapeutics for these rare disorders, which are associated with sex hormone deficiencies and can affect puberty and cause infertility. Forni also recently co-edited a special issue of the genetics journal Genesis celebrating the 20th anniversary of Linda Buck and Richard Axel's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their pioneering work on the olfactory system.
• Associate Professor Eric Hardiman of the School of Social Welfare and Elaine Salisbury, lecturer in the Department of Communication, were named "CCN Faculty Champions" by the Center for Community News at the University of Vermont. This national initiative recognizes leaders in local news reporting programs at U.S. colleges and universities. Hardiman's award will support "UAlbany Stories for Social Justice" – a new academic program that will train and mentor SSW students in media engagement and journalistic reporting to share stories about social justice in their communities. Salisbury's award will support an initiative to bolster community journalism in the Albany area. This semester, her students are partnering with The Spotlight, a local news organization based in Delmar.
• School of Criminal Justice PhD candidate Hilary Jackl’s research was used in a report issued by The Sentencing Project that offers advice for journalists covering crime and justice. Jackl’s research, “The effects of language on the stigmatization and exclusion of returning citizens,” is cited in a recommendation on using humanizing language.
• Robert Jarvenpa, professor emeritus of Anthropology, has authored a new book, Before the Roads, Before the Mines: Denesuline Memories, Narratives, and the Legacy of a Northern Hunting Society, about a subarctic Canadian indigenous community prior to challenges posed by large-scale uranium mining within their traditional homeland. Published by the University of Nebraska Press, the work is based on ethnographic field research Jarvenpa conducted in the community between the early 1970s and early 1990s.
• Joanne Kaufman, an associate professor in Sociology with a joint appointment in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, had an article published in the Sociological Forum last month. “The Contribution of Intimate Partner Violence to Socioeconomic Inequality Among Black, Latina, and White Women” looks at the long-term impact of violent victimization on young women. The research shows that women who faced violence from a partner when they were adolescents and young adults saw reduced educational attainment and income levels 15 years later. 
• Daniel Levy, SUNY Distinguished Professor in UAlbany's Department of Educational Policy and Leadership, has authored a new book, A World of Private Higher Education, consummating decades of his research into this sector, which now accounts for a third of global enrollment, with a definitive account of its development and activities. Published by Oxford University Press, the book draws on the pioneering dataset of the Program for Research on Private Higher Education, a global scholarly network that Levy founded and directs, and that aims to build knowledge about the sector worldwide to inform public discussion and policymaking.  
• Mariola Moeyaert, associate professor in the School of Education’s Department of Educational & Counseling Psychology, is co-principal investigator on a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences for a project titled "Methods for Synthesizing Causal Mediation Effects in Single Case Experimental Design Data," which aims to uncover innovative statistical methods that can help researchers and practitioners understand how interventions produce change in behaviors and/or academic outcomes. The grant, awarded to the University of South Florida (USF), includes a subaward of $373,178 for UAlbany. Moeyaert will be collaborating on the project with Matthew Valente from USF and Milica Miocevic from McGill University.
• Cynthia Najdowski, associate professor of psychology, led a study titled “An exploratory study of racism in social media behavior: Effects of political orientation and motivation to control prejudice,” published in Translational Issues in Psychological Science. With coauthors including students in the Department of Psychology and Rockefeller College, the study explored differences in how racist social media content was viewed among people who identified as conservative versus liberal. In another new study, “Implicit bias training for police: Impacts on enforcement disparities,” published in Law and Human Behavior with Associate Professor of Criminal Justice Robert Worden, Najdowski and coauthors investigated the efficacy of implicit bias training among police officers and found that the training had little effect on behavior in the field. The work was covered in Psychology Today.
• An article co-authored by Justin Pickett, professor of criminal justice, and Shawn Bushway, professor of public administration & policy, examines how bias against nonbinary people varies based on evaluators' (e.g., employers') political party. “Partisan Differences in Hiring and Social Discrimination against Nonbinary Americans,” published in Socius, found Republicans were 10 percent more likely to hire a binary than a nonbinary person, while among Democrats there was no significant difference in hiring decisions. The research also showed a neighbor’s gender identity mattered least to Democrats and most to Republicans, with independent voters falling in the middle. Justin Sola of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was also an author of the article.
• In a guest opinion published for Climate Week in the New York Daily News, Atmospheric Sciences Research Director Chris Thorncroft explained how AI is a critical tool in society's efforts to adapt to climate change.
• Mathias Vuille, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, published a new paper on monsoon intensification in South America in Science Advances that uses paleoclimate data to reconstruct changes in the South American monsoon over the last millennium.
• Shenglong Zhang, associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and the RNA Institute, developed a groundbreaking direct RNA sequencing method described in a new Journal of the American Chemical Society study, “Mass Spectrometry-Based Direct Sequencing of tRNAs De Novo and Quantitative Mapping of Multiple RNA Modifications.” The method enables mass spectrometry to be used to sequence the four RNA nucleotides and also various modified nucleotides simultaneously, with potential applications such as profiling RNA modifications in human diseases.