Don’t expect Cheryl Meany ’02, G’06 to take much of a step back when she is honored at two upcoming West Genesee High School volleyball meets during Breast Cancer Awareness Month. She will be on the sidelines as usual, serving as assistant coach of the Wildcats girls’ varsity team just as she was throughout her recent aggressive treatment for breast cancer.

Her tireless work as a mother, teacher and coach provided not only diversion and wellness during her fight, but inspiration for her students, colleagues, friends and community.

She will be honored at West Genesee’s Pink Ribbon Classic, which takes place at the high school on Saturday, Oct. 11. The tournament—featuring seven other teams—is fundraising for , a Syracuse-based nonprofit that provides wellness, mentoring, transportation and other supports for cancer patients.

West Genesee’s annual Dig Pink game follows on Oct. 14 against their Syracuse-area rival, Westhill High School. Both teams will hit the court wearing pink for breast cancer awareness and fundraising proceeds will again go to Cancer Connects.

Triple Responsibilities

Meany, an English teacher at Baldwinsville High School, was diagnosed with cancer in November 2024, a personal blow just before Thanksgiving. What followed was—to use a volleyball term—a multiple offense combination of chemotherapy, surgery and radiation, from late 2024 through July 2025.

“It’s been crazy,” Meany says.

Although she is still wearing her signature head wrap, as of her most recent scan, she is cancer free. Her hair is returning, and she has embarked on a new regimen of preventative medicine.

To say that Meany kept active throughout this tumult is an understatement. Apart from a few days to rest after each chemotherapy treatment, she took no significant time off from her triple responsibilities and continued to serve others, even “digging” herself out of a few more challenges along the way.

For instance, as a mother to three girls—a West Genesee sophomore and twin fifth graders—she  had to adjust her family’s schedule to accommodate her husband’s work. A , Jason Meany develops training materials for Scuba Divers International, a job that often takes him on the road.

Then, as the Wildcats assistant volleyball coach, she has helped manage the team’s step up to class AAA competition. The trainers must be doing something right because this promotion only seems to have propelled the blue-and-yellow forward. As of this writing, the team has a perfect 10-0 record and recently swept local AAA powerhouse Baldwinsville, Meany’s alma mater.

Even her current teaching assignment—Government, Economics and Literature—is not for the faint of heart. Introducing high schoolers to concepts of society and democracy through texts such as “1984” and “Lord of the Flies” is no mean feat during a contentious political moment.

Finding Balance

Meany says teaching high school seniors during her treatment was a “special situation” because they understood her diagnosis.

“I told the class when my chemotherapy started, and I said that if I’m here, I’m well enough to be here, so we can be normal and have our normal relationships,” she says.

“I was either going to be at home thinking about my diagnosis or out living my life,”  Meany adds.

She even found the strength for a school trip with 17 students to Portugal between her third and fourth chemotherapy sessions.

Staying active, she says, was a choice.

“Everyone was onboard with it,” Meany says. “I needed to stay busy. There were side effects, but I could manage them if I didn’t think about them.”

Meany says her students took care to recognize when she was having an off day. And when her body said to rest, she listened, even if that meant occasionally missing her eldest daughter’s evening wrestling matches.

A double alumna, Meany has kept in close touch with her literacy teacher and mentor, Dean . During the COVID-19 pandemic, the pair mentored student teachers, and she assisted with the research phase for Chandler-Olcott’s next book—a collaboration with Sarah Fleming G’16—on equitable assessment.

“Cheryl was an exceptional undergraduate who turned into one of SOE’s staunchest collaborators once she had her own classroom,” Chandler-Olcott says. “She’s mentored many teacher candidates who became strong practitioners in their own right, and she has modeled for all of them what it means to be a collegial professional committed to continuous learning. I’m so grateful for her continued commitment to all things Orange.”

So, in her 25th year of teaching and having bested breast cancer, what special advice does Meany have for young teachers embarking not only on their professional but life journeys?

“You are going to have challenges,” Meany says. “We teachers tend to put our students, families and others above ourselves, but my cancer diagnosis made me take a step back from giving of myself, to taking care of myself more. I needed that balance, and now I have found it.”

Five years ago, the COVID-19 pandemic upended daily lives across the globe, changing how we learned, how we shopped and how we interacted with each other. Over the following two years, the virus caused the deaths of several million people, including more than 1 million Americans.

For the next month the Maxwell School’s Qualitative Data Repository (QDR) will help us remember this time by hosting a traveling version of an exhibition titled “Picturing the Pandemic: Images from the Pandemic Journaling Project.”

The exhibition is drawn from a collection of images and audio files contributed to the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP), which was started in May 2020 by a team of researchers from the University of Connecticut and Brown University. Their goal was to create an online archive of COVID-19 stories, described as a “grassroots collaborative ethnography.” By May 2022, over 1,800 people from 55 countries had shared nearly 27,000 online journal entries of text, images and audio—including almost 3,000 photos.

Maxwell is the seventh stop for “Picturing the Pandemic,” following exhibitions in Heidelberg, Mexico City and Toronto, as well as Hartford, Connecticut, where the show was first launched in 2022.  The from phase one of the wider PJP early in 2024, making it a natural stop for the traveling exhibition. The exhibition can be found in the first floor foyer of Maxwell Hall until May 15.

The kickoff of the exhibition included a panel discussion featuring PJP co-founders Associate Professor Sarah S. Willen of the University of Connecticut and Associate Professor Katherine A. Mason of Brown University, as well as University Professor Amy Fairchild and Maxwell Associate Dean for Research Shana Gadarian. The talk was moderated by Sebastian Karcher, associate director of QDR.

The full PJP data maintained by QDR is currently available for use and re-use by researchers. Though, to protect privacy, access requires prior approval, with requests submitted from the dataset’s page on the . A significant subset of more than 2,000 entries are also publicly available for searching and browsing by anyone on the .

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization COVID-19 a pandemic after more than 118,000 cases in 114 countries. As we approach the five-year anniversary of the global public health emergency, there are still many uncertainties about how prepared the United States is for the next public health crisis.

For your continuing coverage about the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic and a look back from where we started, here are a few Syracuse University public health and geographical experts for consideration:

The impact of wastewater surveillance beyond COVID-19

David Larsen is Chair of the Department of Public Health in Syracuse University’s Falk College. Larsen’s expertise includes global health, large data analysis and spatial statistics, and sanitation.

Not long after COVID-19 was named a global pandemic, Larsen assembled a team of researchers to begin developing the wastewater surveillance technology that would eventually become critical to New York State’s response to the disease. The  tests for COVID in at least one wastewater treatment plant in all 62 of the state’s counties, covering a population of 15.4 million. The  provides the most recent statistics regarding the network.*

Professor Larsen has spoken extensively with news outlets about COVID-19, including , , , and others.

*Information provided by Syracuse U. News stories from August and Sept. 2024.

Vaccines and the enduring work of public health workers

is an associate professor in the Department of Public Health at Syracuse University. Her areas of specialization include vaccines, infectious diseases, epidemiology, global health, and immunology and environmental exposures, particularly within the context of risks for infectious diseases.

Kmush has been interviewed by the media multiple times for stories about COVID-19 and anti-vaccination trends including by the , , and .

How COVID-19 will help us approach future health crises

is an associate teaching professor in the Department of Public Health at Syracuse University. She teaches undergraduate courses that focus on health promotion, health and disease, and healthcare administration. She is a family nurse practitioner and maintains an outside practice as an emergency healthcare provider at a regional community healthcare center.

She can speak to many public health topics on circulating viruses, illnesses and how to treat them. Previous interviews have been with , , (Syracuse) and many others.

Understanding environments where viruses spread from animals to humans

is an associate professor in the Geography and the Environment Department at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School.

His research specialties include environmental history, environmental humanities and animals and society. He contributed to the book “” which explores how the intertwining lives of all animals has impacted the environment, politics, economies and global culture of the 21^st century.

How optimism and pessimism influence well-being

is an assistant professor of psychology in Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences.

Professor Oh led a team of researchers from Syracuse University and Michigan State University that explored the personal characteristics that help people handle prolonged stressors, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The group delved into optimism and pessimism and how those mindsets influence well-being. Their findings appeared in the  and you can read more in this Syracuse University news story.

Syracuse has additional experts that can speak to topics connected to the pandemic. For more information or to request an interview with any of these professors, contact:

Daryl Lovell
Associate Director of Media Relations
Division of Communications
M��315.380.0206
dalovell@syr.edu |

The National Institute on Aging (NIA) has renewed two grants, each worth $1.9 million, for research networks led by Maxwell School sociology faculty Jennifer Karas Montez and Shannon Monnat and several external collaborators.

For the first grant, Montez, University Professor and Gerald B. Cramer Faculty Scholar in Aging Studies, is a co-principal investigator and Monnat, professor of sociology and Lerner Chair in Public Health Promotion and Population Health, is a co-investigator.

Monnat is a co-principal investigator on the second grant. The NIA, a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), will fund both grants for five years, and the $3.8 million total will be shared across multiple institutions involved in the projects.

The first grant renews funding for the Network on Life Course Health Dynamics and Disparities in 21st Century America, which has been funded for the past 10 years. Montez and Monnat are joined on the network leadership team by Jennifer Ailshire and Julie Zissimopoulos from the University of Southern California, Sarah Burgard and Grace Noppert from the University of Michigan, and Taylor Hargrove and Barbara Entwisle from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The interdisciplinary network of over 100 scholars seeks to accelerate research that will help explain the worrisome trends in U.S. adult health and longevity in recent decades and explain why those trends are most troubling in certain states and local areas.

The second grant will fund the Interdisciplinary Network on Rural Population Health and Aging, which was launched five years ago. Its purpose is to advance research on the factors affecting the health and well-being of rural working-age and older adults within the context of prevailing demographic trends, slow-moving macro-level stressors, and contemporary public health and environmental shocks. Monnat’s collaborators include Carrie Henning-Smith from the University of Minnesota, Leif Jensen from the Pennsylvania State University, John Green from Mississippi State University, and Lori Hunter from the University of Colorado Boulder.

“We are grateful for the National Institute on Aging’s continued support, which not only advances crucial research into U.S. adult health and longevity but also affirms the leadership and scholarship of professors Monnat and Montez,” says Shana Kushner Gadarian, associate dean for research and professor of political science at the Maxwell School. “Their findings will no doubt help inform national and regional population health policy.”

Past research on mortality and health by Montez and Monnat has been supported by the NIA and other organizations. They are principal investigators on the NIA’s , a five-year, $1.8 million award to examine how state policies and counties’ economic conditions since the 1980s have influenced adult psychological well-being, health behaviors and mortality.

Monnat is also principal investigator on a $2 million COVID-related grant funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse with Montez, Douglas A. Wolf and Emily Wiemers as co-investigators. Wolf and Wiemers are professor emeritus and associate professor, respectively, in Maxwell’s Public Administration and International Affairs Department.

Montez is the director of the NIA-funded Center for Aging and Policy Studies (CAPS), co-director of the Policy, Place, and Population Health (P3H) Lab, a faculty associate in the Aging Studies Institute (ASI), and a research affiliate in the Center for Policy Research and the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion and Population Health.

Monnat is the director of and senior research associate in the Center for Policy Research, co-director of the P3H Lab, Lerner Chair in Public Health Promotion and Population Health, and a research affiliate in ASI and CAPS.

Story by Michael Kelly