The (BBI) has been awarded two competitive grants from the , part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Together, the awards total $4. 5 million over three years and will bring a significant infusion of new research, education and outreach activity to BBI and the University.

“This is an amazing day for BBI,” says , BBI chairman and University Professor at the . “These awards are a testament to my BBI colleagues, the support of the Office of Sponsored Research and the entire Syracuse University community.”

Training the Next Generation of Researchers

A $750,000 grant will fund the Advanced Rehabilitation Research and Training Program on the Future of Employment for People with Disabilities. , director of research for BBI and a research assistant professor in the College of Law, is principal investigator. Blanck is co-PI.

The program will recruit and train four postdoctoral fellows to study disability employment policy, practice and law, including the role of artificial intelligence in these areas. Fellows will join BBI’s Disability Employment Policy Rehabilitation Research and Training Center, work with faculty mentors and complete a community practicum with disability-led organizations.

“Employment among people with disabilities has reached historic highs, but a significant employment gap remains, and we need to study both,” Hyseni says. “This national program will train leading young career researchers to do that work.”

Syracuse mentors include , and of the , and of the . They are joined by scholars from Harvard and Rutgers Universities and the National Organization on Disability.

The application period for the 2026-27 fellowships opens Sunday, Nov. 1. is available on the BBI website.

Renewing ADA Support Across the Southeast

A $3.7 million competitive renewal will continue BBI’s leadership of the , with Blanck as PI. One of 10 regional centers in the ADA National Network, the center provides information, training and guidance across eight states: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. It reaches more than 1 million stakeholders annually.

“The Southeast ADA Center makes a positive difference in the lives of individuals with disabilities and their families by fostering understanding of the ADA,” says , program director and co-PI, who is BBI’s director of outreach.

Over the next three years, the center will build partnerships among the disability community, government, business and community organizations, and produce new knowledge about employment, health care and economic self-sufficiency.

Paul Smyth has dedicated nearly three decades to answering the call. As a paramedic and manager of emergency medical services for , he has walked into more crises than most people encounter in a lifetime.

Now, Smyth is turning his attention to what happens to first responders after the call ends, and he’s building a program for the student first responders he manages in SUA.

Smyth was recently selected for the Division of State Emergency Medical Services Mental Health Fellowship, a yearlong program run in partnership with the He is one of 20 fellows chosen statewide from a pool of 50 to 60 applicants.

Developing Resilience

The fellowship’s central focus is resilience—giving first responders and their leaders the tools to process trauma in healthier ways than simply pushing through it. That mission resonates deeply with Smyth, who has spent 15 years at SUA after a long career with community emergency services agencies. He has learned to compartmentalize difficult calls, he says, but he knows that not everyone can or should have to.

“That complacency will get you,” Smyth says of the pressure first responders face after tragic calls.

His question, increasingly, is what he can do to better support SUA’s student members, both in the moment and long after the sirens fade.

That question carries extra weight on a college campus, where student Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) juggle calls alongside classes—and where the calls aren’t always minor. Smyth has responded to cardiac arrests and other traumatic emergencies on campus with students who had never faced anything like it before.

One number from the fellowship’s training has stuck with him: the average person experiences three to four critical incidents in a lifetime, while first responders can face hundreds.

“I’ve seen firsthand how much resilience training matters, both in this line of work and in my military career,” says Joseph Hernon, associate vice president for emergency and environmental risk services. “Paul’s work through this fellowship is exactly the kind of investment we need to be making in our people, giving students tools to process what they see isn’t optional; it’s how we make sure they can sustain this work, in EMS or wherever their careers take them.”

Through the fellowship, Smyth has completed a three-day resiliency officer training modeled on a program developed by the armed forces and later adopted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He is now serving as SUA’s resiliency point person, developing a critical incident stress debriefing presentation for weekly training and preparing to administer an anonymous, confidential survey to SUA’s more than 90 members to gauge how well the agency is currently supporting their mental health.

Fostering Coping Strategies

Smyth also draws on the University’s , connecting students with counseling services when a call hits especially hard. It’s a resource, he notes, that many community agencies don’t have.

For Smyth, the payoff is measured in the years ahead, not just for the students who stay in EMS, but for those who move into other health care fields after graduation. Giving them coping tools now, he believes, will serve them long after they leave Syracuse.

“The resiliency and tools our students build here don’t stay in the classroom or our EMS agency—they go on to shape how our students handle setbacks, solve problems and adapt long after they’ve crossed the graduation stage,” says Smyth.

Smyth and his counterpart from the Harpers Ferry Ambulance in New York’s Southern Tier, which serves Binghamton University, are the first two collegiate EMS professionals to take part in the program since it launched two years ago.

Other fellowship recipients include first responders from across the state, spanning both EMS and fire services.

The fellowship runs through next June, with additional in-person training, monthly virtual sessions and a statewide survey still ahead.

Student researchers participating in the 2025-26 fellowship in , will discuss their cultural experiences and research findings at a campuswide symposium .

The researchers took part in the program, which pairs ��selected fellows with academic programs offered at locations. The center has offered student-faculty research fellowships on social justice issues for eight years and began offering shorter-term global research opportunities two years ago.

Students will share findings from their research on human rights issues arising from the in Chile.

Ohemaa Asibuo ’27 analyzed archived lists of victims of political retribution from records at Santiago’s . The international relations and Spanish dual major in the �� and the analyzed data regarding Chileans who once supported Pinochet’s leadership but were later labeled as traitors.

Mauricio Paredes, director of Syracuse Abroad’s program, says Asibuo’s research of presenting the victims by demographic categories broke new ground and set the stage for further museum staff findings.

Asibuo regards her commemorative education work as “extremely important in preventing these types of things from occurring again. I hope to continue to advocate for using past historical events as warnings to help us navigate how we approach our futures.”

Jherlyn Brady ’27, a communication and rhetorical studies major in the , learned that Chile’s educational system “was used by the dictatorship to raise nationalism and neoliberalism. They closed institutions responsible for educating teachers; elites and the military created and governed their own schools. That exacerbated economic disparities that still affect Chileans today.” The experience “let me see the institution of education in a different context,” she says. “It can be either a source of social control or a tool of liberation.”

College of Arts and Sciences and Maxwell School political philosophy major Laila Terrell ’27 analyzed the rhetoric of , a women’s organization run by Pinochet’s wife. Though the group taught women skills for work and involvement in their communities, it also promoted the regime’s mantras and ideas about what women should be, Terrell says.

She observed that “these women could genuinely benefit from CEMA while also being part of an organization that helped support a violent dictatorship, making the idea of ‘empowerment’ much more complicated than it first appears.”

Sophia Ortiz-Heaney ’27, a Maxwell School economics and international relations dual major, says chatting with local residents and visiting former clandestine detention centers helped her “understand Chilean society on a more profound level. [They] pushed me to think about how history and movements shape the built environment…[and] understand the true extent to which the dictatorship has and still does impact the experiences, opportunities and everyday lives of Chileans.”

Also presenting are Mason Rosenbaum ’27 and Grant Montonye ’28, both international relations majors in the Maxwell School. Rosenbaum recalls conversations with Museum of Memory staff as “a particularly moving experience.” Montoye studied how Chilean constitutions were developed to justify Pinochet regime actions.

Madiou Bah ’27, a broadcast and digital journalism major in the , analyzed the use of propaganda and how governments use fear and media to control and maintain power.

Other students in the Syracuse Abroad Santiago Center program will now continue exploring those themes using teaching and learning materials developed by the Lender Global fellows, particularly those in the new .

A new grant recently awarded to two faculty members by the (NIH) underlines Syracuse University’s national reputation in public policy, population health and aging research.

The $1.3 million , a training grant awarded to professors ���Ի���, provides support to outstanding doctoral students who will lead the next generation of population health science on how policies and place-level factors shape the health and well-being of U.S. midlife and older adults. Their work will help tackle two troubling national trends: a decline in the health and longevity of U.S. midlife and older adults, along with large and increasing geographic differences in those populations’ health and longevity.

“This grant signifies that Syracuse��University��and the Maxwell School are on the map nationally for , and as the national scientific community responds��to declining health and longevity among U.S. midlife and older adults and a growing geographic divide in life expectancy,”��says Monnat, who is a professor of sociology, Chair in Public Health Promotion and Population Health and director of the��.����Wiemers is Maxwell Dean Professor of Aging, Demography and Public Policy and director of the��.

The award, implemented through the NIH’s , funds doctoral students in ,�� ���Ի�������(in the Maxwell School) ���Ի��� (in the ), and supports specialized training to study why residents of some American communities are experiencing poor health and dying years ahead of others.

The Maxwell School is augmenting the grant funds with additional support for the scholars.

Multi-Disciplinary Model

In a multi-layered, multi-disciplinary model, the students conduct mentored research with a home-department faculty member. They are also paired with faculty from disciplines across the University known for shaping national conversations about health policy.��Those faculty will serve as secondary mentors. Biweekly,��cross-disciplinary lab��sessions, research seminars, data and methods workshops and research working groups, as well as cross-disciplinary professional networking events, enhance the learning environment.

“What’s great��is��that��this structure pulls together doctoral students, postdoctoral scholars��and faculty from across departments, creating��a more��connected multidisciplinary research community��studying issues of crucial importance for the health of midlife and older Americans,” Wiemers says.

The researchers’ shared goal is to prepare the next generation of scholars to study how the policies that are adopted and the places where people live shape how Americans age, then translate that evidence for the people who make health policy decisions, Monnat and Wiemers say.

Who’s Eligible, How to Apply

Applicants accepted to those four Ph.D. programs, having a strong academic record, outstanding research skills and methods preparation and demonstrated interest in population health and aging, and who are a good fit with program mentors, are welcome to apply.

Application requirements vary by department��and according to . More information is available on the��.

As ��turns��15 this year,��it��is marking its own coming of age by exploring one of the most cherished traditions across Latino cultures: the��,��the celebration of a girl’s 15^th���������ٳ�岹��.

La Casita was founded in 2011 by College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Professor and former faculty member , working with other University faculty, staff, and community leaders. Its development grew out of a two-year participatory process of community dialogues, workshops and focus groups where Syracuse residents helped shape what the center would become.

Over��15 years,��La Casita��has served thousands of��students and local residents��and has become “much more than a��cultural center,” says��, executive director of the University’s��. “It is simultaneously a community resource, a learning environment, a research site and an archive of Latino life in Central New York.”

Among��La Casita’s most significant achievements��are the��documentation and preservation of��its ���������ٳ����New York Heritage Digital Collections�����Ի���a partnership with the����that explores ��migration, family, identity and cultural memory in Latino communities.

As an experiential learning and research environment, La Casita has��hosted more than 2,600 students from the University ���Ի���other regional institutions as interns, researchers and volunteers who often remain connected with the center long after graduation.

Last year,��34 students held internships or assistantships;��170 students logged 2,000+ hours of volunteer or service-learning activity;��11 University courses integrated��La Casita programming;�����Ի���12 student researchers��used its materials and programs.

Eighty youths enjoy weekly after-school programs and 30 women are engaged in adult programming. A new collaboration with Buena Vida of Central New York extends programming to elders.

A Forefront Role

After 15 years of building trust and reciprocal relationships between the University and Syracuse’s Latino communities, Paniagua sees an opportunity to position the��University at the forefront of research on Latino communities, cultural memory and community-engaged learning.

“La Casita is at an important moment,” Paniagua says. “We want to continue strengthening the programs that have become central to our mission: youth arts and education, arts and cultural programming, community-engaged research and opportunities for students. We also want to think ambitiously about its role in the next 15 years. Our programs have generated thousands of photographs, oral histories, research projects, exhibitions, student experiences and community stories. Examining those materials for this anniversary has made us realize how important that institutional history has become.”

Anniversary Events��

Two events��mark��La Casita’s anniversary. An exhibition, “Sueños��de��Quinceañera/Quinceañera��Dreams,”�� opens��.

Argentine-American author����will��present a talk��about��her books,��“” and “,” on .

Both events are free and open to the public and are part of this year’s Syracuse Symposium, “.”

Students from all backgrounds have the opportunity to work with acclaimed researcher and storyteller and the award-winning by applying for the 2026-28 Lender Center for Social Justice Student Fellowship. Berry, an associate professor of writing, rhetoric and composition in the , ��is the 2026-28 Lender Faculty Fellow.

Berry’s work explores how publishing and collaborative media production can create new opportunities for civic participation, public dialogue and professional development for people impacted by the criminal legal system.

Project Mend is a multimodal, grassroots-level, open-access archive of creative works and narratives produced by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals and their communities.

The of “,” a print and digital journal of published fiction, nonfiction, poetry and visual art, was released last spring.

For his work on Project Mend, Berry was awarded the $10,000 Syracuse Prize from . He was also recognized with the ‘s Outstanding College-Community Partnership Award.

Hands-On Experience

Lender Student Fellowships are open to graduate and undergraduate students from all schools and colleges. Five students will be selected to work with Berry as active co-creators alongside Project Mend’s interdisciplinary editorial and production teams.

Along with hands-on experience in collaborative scholarship, community partnership and public-facing media production, students will review and edit submissions, interview writers, develop podcasts, assist with film, multimedia and theater productions or conduct research on incarceration, reentry, community publishing and the public humanities.

Berry says he hopes student fellows “gain a richer understanding of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people beyond statistics or stereotypes… [and see] the humanities as having the potential to promote public dialogue and communication across difference.”

Stipends Provided

Undergraduate fellows receive a $2,000 stipend and graduate student fellows receive $5,000 across the two-year research term. They also have access to additional research funds and support. Fellows will present their work at a symposium in May 2028.

Application deadline is Friday, Oct. 2, at 5 p.m.

An information session will be held Wednesday, Sept. 16, at 2 p.m. in 207 Bowne Hall. ��For more information, visit the .

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, professor of biomedical and chemical engineering in the����(ECS), has been named director of the University’s��.

“My vision is to build a trust-based community where we elevate our research together. I am optimistic about securing center-scale and collaborative funding and championing new entrepreneurship and industry partnerships,” Soman says.

He also plans to help incubate a new generation of Syracuse University-based entrepreneurs in BioInspired’s core focus areas.

Soman succeeds��, senior associate dean for faculty affairs in ECS, who��has��led the institute��since 2023 ���Ի���remains an active member.

Soman joined the Syracuse faculty in 2013 as a member of the Biomaterials Institute and later as a BioInspired affiliate. He also served�� as a program director for the .

His lab builds light-based tools to grow lab models of organs, print living tissue at scale and study how biological systems process information. The work could transform how scientists model disease, build replacement tissue and understand the limits of biological intelligence.

Institute founding director��, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, says Soman brings valuable perspective to the role.

“Pranav has a strong commitment to supporting both fundamental scientific advances and translating those advances into products that help people,” she says. “Those qualities make him an excellent choice to move the institute forward to build an entrepreneurial biotechnology and material science workforce and to champion researchers and trainees in a time of substantial research funding uncertainty.”

During his time as BioInspired director, Henderson has grown the institute on nearly every front. Nine new faculty joined its ranks, and co-located lab space expanded twice over to house five new affiliates in 2023 and five more in 2024. Equipment also kept pace with the acquisition of a new Zeiss Sigma 360 field emission scanning electron microscope, a first-of-its-kind addition to the .

Henderson also pushed the institute into new intellectual territory: an NSF-funded emergent intelligence research training program, led by Manning as principal investigator,�� serves 115 graduate students over the program lifetime. A new focus group, Posthumanities: Arts and Sciences, bridges research across the arts, humanities and sciences. Intramural funding from the institute backed projects on polar fungi survival and shape memory polymers.

That momentum is clear at the institute’s annual research symposium, where student poster presentations grew from 79 in 2023 to 115 in 2025, and research distinction awards rose from student poster presentations to 11 in 2025.

Hunter Pyke ’27 spent four years as a U.S. Marine Corps anti-tank missileman before enrolling at Syracuse University. Matthew Soukup ’27 served 11 years in the Navy as an aviation electronics technician. Varun Gollapudi ’27 was a U.S. Army flight paramedic and now serves as a detachment sergeant for Forward Resuscitative Surgical Detachment in the Army Reserves. This summer, all three spent eight weeks in research settings studying issues related to the mental health and well-being of veterans just like them.

It’s the kind of opportunity that reflects why Syracuse University has become the best place for veteran and military-connected students—not just supporting them but putting them at the center of research that could shape care for the broader veteran community.

The three rising seniors made up the inaugural cohort of the , which paired them with faculty mentors from Syracuse’s (CHB), a collaborative initiative of the , the , and the (IVMF).

. Over 20-hour weeks, the students dug into cutting-edge research, mental health care, and community programming for veterans and military service members. They conducted a meta-analysis of student veteran mental health. They also helped with a study aimed at encouraging healthier alcohol-related behavior among veterans in VA integrated primary care settings. Their research also stretched into issues of post-traumatic stress disorder, chronic pain, moral injury and suicide prevention.

New Skills, New Direction

For Pyke, a psychology and neuroscience major in the (A&S), the experience sharpened how he thinks. The work, he says, “furthered my academic development and gave me a new perspective on how to approach problems, evaluate possible solutions and consider the needs of the individuals involved.”

Soukup, also a psychology major, says the program, which comes with a $2,500 stipend, let him focus fully on the work without financial stress. It also opened his eyes to what comes next. “Our visits to community groups doing real work in the field has provided newfound insight into what potential future careers could look like,” he says.

Gollapudi, a biology/pre-med major who spent his career as an operational medic, found particular meaning in learning directly from faculty experts. “Working with [these professionals] is an amazing opportunity to learn and fine tune my skills,” he says. Field trips and conversations with fellow veterans, he adds, gave him a deeper understanding of behavioral health issues.

Program coordinator and CHB/��(IVMF) postdoctoral scholar ��says visits to the Syracuse VA Medical Center, Clear Path for Veterans, Veterans Treatment Court and Altamont Syracuse Veterans Residential Program, along with training on suicide prevention and other wellness topics, “allowed the students to translate academic literature to on-the-ground applications. They are learning from people who are doing the work and seeing the outcomes of those efforts.”

The Program Behind the Experience

An extension of the University’s to veterans and military-connected families, the CHB-sponsored program grew out of the , a partnership between CHB, the IVMF and the (OVMA).

“Our goal was to extend that experiential learning model to create an accessible, high-impact pathway connecting student development with active scholarship and mentorship and with veteran-serving organizations while helping strengthen the University’s veteran and military academic ecosystem,” says , CHB director and professor of psychology in A&S.

Ditre co-leads the program with ’07, CHB associate director of education and training and an associate teaching professor of social work in the , and Rabinowitz. The program was supported by Marfilius’ , with additional funding from CHB.

Ditre says the students have been highly engaged, taking full advantage of these new research, training and professional development opportunities. “The students are building new skills, clarifying their career interests and forming connections across Syracuse University and the broader veteran-serving community,” Marfilius adds.

The program strengthens cross-unit collaboration between CHB, IVMF and OVMA and builds a longer-term pipeline into research, graduate training and health-profession careers. Moving forward, organizers hope to expand the number of scholars, mentors and research opportunities while preserving the close mentorship that defines the program.

Several factors shape how people bond with a beloved place, whether it’s a childhood hometown or a vacation spot. Usually those locations are physical ones, but with increasingly realistic digital and online worlds that can be accessed from almost anywhere, virtual spaces can easily keep pace in creating those deep connections.

That’s why some people feel so gratified playing a favorite video game like , become immersed in Gotham City streetscapes watching a movie, or get caught up in living out an assumed persona in a online community.

Those concepts reflect an arm of ongoing research by Professor , who oversees doctoral and master’s programs in and at the .

Bowman studies the cognitive, emotional, physical and social demands of interactive media content and how people experience emotional connections to meaningful locations in their lives.

Below, he shares how people develop bonds to places real and virtual, and why that happens.

For more information about SPIRE and “Sense of Place,” see “,” (Poetics, Bowman and Banks.)