Syracuse University’s three study away locations, which provide distinct and wide-ranging opportunities for students, are an equally valuable resource for their professors.

Several faculty members capitalized on those resources this summer, supported by funding from the new program offered by the . The awards were established as a direct result of work done on the University’s academic strategic plan, “,” with the aim of facilitating in Los Angeles, New York City and Washington, D.C.

“These locations give our faculty a rare kind of reach,” says , associate provost for strategic initiatives. “These are fully embedded footholds in three of the most influential cities in the world. They provide an opportunity to extend the classroom into the center of the industries our students are preparing to enter, and to let that experience shape both scholarship and pedagogy in expansive ways.”

Participating faculty members agree that the experience enhanced their professional work and helped lay the groundwork for new academic experiences. , associate professor of public administration and international affairs at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, was one of them. He conducted archival research at the United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld Library and think tank collections with an eye toward building a study away program centered on peacekeeping and global governance. “New York City is one of the world’s great cities and a hub for innovation, international business, civil society and global governance,” he says. “It has been great spending the summer learning how to access the best of what the city has to offer to enhance the education of Syracuse students.”

Two Syracuse University faculty members have received a (NEH) grant to digitize portions of the —a rare, 54-volume trove of 18^th-century documents charting , and relations in the years surrounding the .

, principal investigator and assistant professor in the , and , co-principal investigator and professor of in the , received nearly $350,000 for their two-year project, “E Pluribus Unum: The American Revolution at the Intersection of Ideas and Interests.” Their project is one of to mark the country’s 250th anniversary, including 33 grants awarded under NEH’s new funding opportunity.

Amherst commanded British forces in North America during the , helping secure Britain’s victory. Housed at the , the 54 volumes span the 1740s to 1790s and include military correspondence, orders and reports from the war, including Amherst’s letters to and from , and .

Three-Way Relations

The collection captures the three-way relationship among British officials, colonial American leaders and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in the years before the American Revolution. Their content illuminates how ideas of liberty, sovereignty and democracy developed amid diplomacy, conflict and negotiation in that era.

The archived materials have long been largely inaccessible to the public, somewhat because of their bulk and a lack of freely accessible digital surrogates of the materials, apart from some cumbersome digitized WWII-era microfilm, Modrow says.

This project aims to change that. In 2026, Modrow and Arnold will travel to London to photograph each document individually, producing high-resolution digital surrogates. They’ll then tag the images with metadata and use the AI-powered app to make them full-text-searchable by name, date and subject. That will let researchers search tens of thousands of pages in seconds, rather than leafing through folders by hand.

Student Helpers

Once digitized, Modrow will recruit a project coordinator and iSchool and Arts and Sciences students to fact-check the AI-generated transcriptions, comparing the descriptions against the original 18th-century handwriting for accuracy.

After vetting, the collection will be uploaded to an Omeka-based, open-source platform hosted on the iSchool’s servers, Modrow says.

Window to Relations

Amherst’s papers offer an underused window into the alliances, rivalries and negotiations that shaped American independence, Arnold says. While British and colonial-patriot perspectives of this time are well documented, these papers can help remedy missing Haudenosaunee Confederacy viewpoints, material Arnold plans to bring into his classes and offer at public workshops to broaden understanding of the era’s varied perspectives, he says.

“Despite the confederacy’s influence on the era’s diplomacy, conflict and the development of Western democratic ideas, the Haudenosaunee viewpoint has remained comparatively obscure. This is a critically important collection. It is a continuation of many decades of work around the and how Haudenosaunee, British and American actions 250 years ago interacted to create the world we inhabit today.”

Modrow, Arnold and other members of the Doctrine of Discovery research group participated in a British National Archives exhibit about the entire War of Independence, “,” while in London in 2025 to research the Amherst Papers.

At Syracuse University, some of the most valuable classroom instruction is based not on a textbook but on decades spent solving real problems in the field. Professors of practice bring that kind of expertise directly to students, translating professional experience into lessons that go beyond theory. Nearly 100 professors of practice across the University represent one of the most direct ways Syracuse connects academic learning to the industry.

That connection is central to , one of the areas of distinctive excellence outlined in the academic strategic plan, “.” Where traditional coursework builds foundational knowledge, professors of practice show students how that knowledge is applied in real settings. Their presence ensures Syracuse’s academic programs stay current with an evolving professional landscape, giving students a clearer view of the careers they’re preparing to enter.

We sat down with three professors of practice to hear more about their approach: , professor of practice in forensic science in the College of Arts and Sciences;�� , Cramer Family Professor of Practice in Community Impact in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs; and , professor of practice in the School of Information Studies.

Bernard Appiah didn’t set out to become a public health communication scholar. He originally trained as a pharmacist, but during his studies he took on editing a student magazine and discovered the power of communication.

He has since built a career researching how communications can change public health behavior and outcomes in Africa. Last year, that work , one of the field’s highest honors.

, who recently earned tenure as an associate professor of public health in the , traces his approach to public health communications back to his childhood in Ghana, where his father served as the community’s gong beater, relaying messages from the village chief.

Watching his father taught him early lessons about clarity and consistency, ideas he later built into his “10+10+30” model. The communication format blends a 10-minute radio drama series, followed by a 10-minute discussion by community health workers and then a 30-minute listener call-in segment to spread health information in low- and middle-income countries.

His research has shown measurable results, including a project in Ethiopia that linked use of radio drama about childhood vaccination to higher rates of immunization.

Below, Appiah discusses the roots of his approach, the balance between education and entertainment and where he sees global health communication headed next.

Four faculty members in the early stages of their research careers have earned recognition and funding from the (NSF) this year through its award program.

The CAREER program is among the most prestigious awards NSF offers. It supports early-career faculty who show promise as both researchers and teachers and who weave education into their scientific work.

“CAREER awards are among the most competitive NSF offers, and they give a researcher’s work real momentum at a pivotal stage,” says Duncan Brown, vice president for research. “They tell the national scientific community that innovative work is happening here, and because the program values teaching as much as discovery, students can be confident they’re learning from faculty at the leading edge of their fields. Earning four awards in a single year speaks to the caliber of faculty joining, and at, Syracuse—and to what our students gain from learning alongside them.”

Receiving awards this year are:

, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in the ($611,222)

Gan received the grant for his project “A Systematic Framework for Morphological Adaptation and Control of Transformable Legged Robots.” Most robots have a fixed shape; Gan is building one that doesn’t. His legged robot can change its own body—adjusting leg length, posture or shape—to walk, jump, crawl or carry a load. His work develops the math and controls that let a machine reshape itself as the task changes, with possible uses in search and rescue, disaster response and space exploration.

The award also builds a robotics pipeline for students at every stage: middle schoolers will program small four-legged robots, high schoolers will take on a self-driving racecar challenge, and Syracuse undergraduates will help teach them and carry the research into the classroom.

, assistant professor of physics in the (A&S) ($770,516).

Pashine received funding for “Adaptability of Soft Deformable Granular Materials.” She studies granular materials—think sand or a bag of beads—but with a twist: her particles can bend, grip and change their size, shape and stiffness. Using custom-built robotic particles, she traces how the behavior of single grains adds up to how the whole material acts—whether it flows or holds firm. The goal is “programmable” matter that can be tuned to respond in specific ways.

Her project also brings physics to a wider audience. With a Syracuse colleague in mathematics and education, she is designing an algebra-based “meaningful physics” course for non-majors that ties the material to students’ everyday lives.

Undergraduate researchers will build interactive demonstrations in her lab that then travel to K-12 classrooms, creating a chain of hands-on science engagement.

, assistant professor of mathematics in A&S ($400,000)

Pollitz received the funds for his project “Applications of Koszul Duality to Local Algebra.” He works in areas of mathematics that study number-like systems called rings and the patterns in how their parts fit together. He focuses on rings with “singularities”—points where the structure turns irregular and is hard to pin down.

His main tool is Koszul duality, which recasts a hard problem in a friendlier setting to tame calculations that would otherwise run on forever. Teaching sits at the center of the award: Pollitz will run week-long masterclasses and immersive summer schools—modeled on European programs—that bring students and researchers together for intensive, hands-on work and build a wider community around the field.

, assistant professor of physics in A&S ($1,007,943).

Mihovilovic Skanata’s award advances her research on how a brain turns what it senses into what an animal does. Her model is the fruit fly larva, simple enough to study almost neuron by neuron. Her five-year project, Lessons From a Simple Brain, asks how neural circuits weigh competing signals and settle on a response.

Her interdisciplinary lab spans physics, neuroscience, engineering and computer science. The team builds its own instruments—including a microscope that follows a larva and records its brain activity as it moves freely—to watch the brain at work in real time.

The award also opens the lab to students. It funds an intensive “NeuroBootCamp,” a six-week summer research program for high schoolers run with the Syracuse City School District, and public science events such as “Ask a Scientist” at the Museum of Science & Technology.

At the intersection of physics and human reproduction,��is helping answer one of fertility medicine’s most persistent questions: why do some human eggs fail to divide their chromosomes correctly? Errors in this process can mean a pregnancy that ends before it begins, or an IVF cycle that doesn’t succeed.

Kelleher, an assistant professor of physics in the and a member of the University’s��, is trained as a biophysicist, but his work is poised to reshape how scientists assess egg and embryo quality.

A Cellular Machine Built to Move Chromosomes

As egg cells develop, they must physically move their chromosomes into position so that, if fertilized, the resulting embryo receives the correct number of chromosomes. To do this, egg cells build a specialized structure called the spindle, which attaches to chromosomes and exerts the forces needed to separate them properly.

“This research will develop a promising method to measure the spindle, and investigate whether the resulting data can tell us about the potential of individual egg cells to develop successfully,” Kelleher says.

Chromosome segregation errors are a major cause of embryonic aneuploidy (a condition in which an embryo has too many or too few chromosomes), miscarriage and failed embryo development in in vitro fertilization (IVF). Kelleher’s project, “Quantitative Links Between Cellular Energy Availability, Spindle Function and Chromosome Segregation in Human Oocytes,” funded by a����(ASRM), aims to close a knowledge gap and get to the root cause of those segregation errors.

Partnering with Fertility Clinics

The Kelleher lab is developing non-invasive imaging techniques to measure spindle structure in living oocytes (immature egg cells). The technique relies on polarized light microscopy, which uses the way light passes through the spindle to reveal details about its structure without damaging the egg. This is similar to how X-rays allow doctors see bone structure without harming the patient.

Polarization microscopy of spindles isn’t new; it’s already used in IVF clinics.

“Our work builds on this by using computational image analysis and physics-based modeling to extract properties of the spindle that could not be measured previously,” Kelleher says.

Prior work showed the technique can measure spindle properties in mouse egg cells, but mice are not a perfect stand-in for humans. Chromosome segregation fails far more often in human eggs, so testing the method in human eggs required a research partner.

“It is essential to directly test these methods in human eggs, which can only be obtained by partnering with IVF clinics such as CNY Fertility and Boston IVF,” Kelleher says.

The eggs donated by those clinics and used in the research are ones that would not have been used for IVF treatment because they might be unsuitable for fertilization, he says.

Because the imaging technique is non-invasive and doesn’t damage the egg, Kelleher envisions it eventually being used to directly assess individual eggs under consideration for fertilization in IVF clinics. Looking further ahead, he says similar methods could even be used to tailor growth conditions for each individual egg or embryo, improving the odds that at least one develops successfully. Together, those applications could raise IVF success rates and lower treatment costs.

What the Grant Makes Possible

As Syracuse’s first recipient of an ASRM grant, Kelleher says the award carries meaning beyond the funding itself.

“It will fully fund a graduate student and a postdoc for several years, which will allow us to make progress much faster,” he says. “I am somewhat of an outsider in the IVF field, so it is encouraging that the reproductive medicine community finds our work of interest, and great for my industry partners at CNY Fertility to see this external validation.”

The lab has nearly finished setting up its microscopes and has already imaged spindles in mouse egg cells for practice. It recently received its first shipments of frozen human egg cells and expects to begin imaging them by the end of summer.

The ASRM Research Institute serves as a catalyst for groundbreaking discoveries in areas often overlooked by traditional funding sources. Kelleher’s award reflects that mission, bringing a physicist’s toolkit to bear on one of reproductive medicine’s most consequential open questions.

Fertilization is often imagined as a frantic race, with millions of sperm competing for a single prize. But new research by a team of evolutionary biologists from Syracuse University, University of Siena, Italy, and University of Szeged, Hungary, reveals a more surprising reality, where success can depend less on competition and more on cooperation.

The group focused their study on organisms called arthropods, a large and diverse part of the animal kingdom that includes spiders, crabs, insects and centipedes. The scientists explored instances throughout history where arthropod sperm worked together in coordinated groups, forming structures to improve their chances of reaching and fertilizing an egg. This process, known as sperm conjugation, is reshaping what researchers thought they understood about reproduction and evolution.

A Different Way to Win

To visualize sperm conjugation, think of a coordinated team of rowers. Although first described more than a century ago, the phenomenon was long assumed to be rare. The team’s new findings, published in��,��suggest it is widespread across arthropods and has evolved repeatedly over time.

“Fertilization is often viewed as a competition among individual sperm, but in many species we see cells working together in ways that can influence reproductive success,” says��, professor of biology at Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) and co-author of the study.

In numerous species, this coordination depends on sperm-associated material (SAM), a membrane-bound substance that can bind sperm together or form external structures that organize them into groups. Researchers believe SAM may have played a key role in the origin of sperm conjugation, first evolving as a way to package or protect sperm.

Alone, a sperm cell faces a complex and demanding journey through the female reproductive tract. Together, grouped sperm may gain advantages in movement, coordination or function, turning reproduction into a team effort rather than a solo race.

That insight challenges long-standing assumptions about fertility. Instead of focusing solely on the performance of individual sperm, researchers must now consider how collective behavior influences reproductive success.

Watch the video below to see sperm conjugation in action.

Evolution’s Experimentation Lab

Part of what makes this discovery so striking, according to the research team, is evidence of how often sperm conjugation has arisen, and disappeared, throughout evolutionary history. It first appeared hundreds of millions of years ago and has been gained and lost many times across species. In fact, this study found the ancestor of all insects had conjugated sperm.

To uncover these patterns, the researchers conducted a large-scale comparative analysis of sperm from across arthropods, drawing on decades of published studies. By comparing sperm traits across hundreds of diverse species and mapping them onto an evolutionary family tree, the team reconstructed when different forms of sperm cooperation likely evolved and how often they were lost or regained over time.

“Evolution has effectively run the same experiment over and over again across different groups of arthropods,” says R. Antonio Gomez, postdoctoral scholar in A&S’ Department of Biology and lead author of the study. “That allows us to see not only when sperm cooperation emerges, but also when it disappears and reappears under different evolutionary conditions.”

For the study’s authors, that pattern highlights evolution’s trial-and-error nature.

“Sperm are the most rapidly evolving cell type,” says��, Weeden Professor of Biology in A&S and senior author of the study. “They are shaped by the unique challenge of operating outside the body in the complex environment of the female reproductive tract.”

Why It Matters Beyond Biology

While the research is rooted in evolutionary biology, its implications extend far beyond it. For example, these findings could reshape how scientists think about fertility across the animal kingdom. Fertilization, Pitnick says, is more like an obstacle course than a simple race, and it involves complex interactions between sperm and the female reproductive tract. Understanding how sperm cooperate or rely on shared structures could reveal new approaches to human reproductive challenges.

The work is also opening new avenues for pest control. Researchers are exploring how sperm conjugation and SAM might be used to disrupt reproduction in harmful species. This includes the invasive spotted lanternfly, a growing agricultural threat in New York and other eastern states.

Unlike other species, lanternfly sperm do not form cooperative groups. Instead, each sperm is encased in a thick coating of SAM.

“Their sperm are highly unusual,” Pitnick says. “They do not have conjugation, but each individual sperm is completely embedded in this material, and we do not even know how they are motile.”

How these sperm actually function remains a mystery, but this unusual biology may offer an opportunity. If SAM is critical to reproduction, disrupting it could provide a highly targeted control strategy.

Future Directions

One question remains especially fundamental: Why does sperm cooperation evolve in the first place?

Current hypotheses suggest cooperation might improve movement or help deliver important molecules to specific locations within the reproductive tract. But testing those ideas is difficult, in part because sperm behave differently on glass slides, where they are easily observed, than they do in the complex environment of the female reproductive tract.

Future research aims to address that gap by observing how sperm groups function inside reproductive systems and by identifying the specific advantages or trade-offs of working together.

A New Perspective on Cooperation

The team’s findings highlight an important biological insight, showing that cooperation and competition are not opposites but partners. Even at the microscopic level, success often depends on striking the right balance between the two.

“What makes this pattern so fascinating is that evolution keeps arriving at similar cooperative solutions in very different groups and across vast expanses of time,” says Dorus. “These examples remind us that cooperation can be just as important as competition in shaping biological success.”

By uncovering how tiny cells collaborate to overcome challenges, scientists are gaining new insights into evolution, reproduction and the hidden strategies that sustain life. In doing so, they are helping fill a long-standing gap in understanding how complex reproductive traits evolve and diversify over hundreds of millions of years.

Moon-Heum Cho and Alexander Corbitt, professors in the University’s , have been awarded a $50,000 planning grant from the ��program to develop a game-based digital learning platform that teaches elementary students AI literacy through personal finance decision-making.

The project,��, will use narrative-driven simulations to help students in grades 3 and 4 understand how AI systems collect data and generate recommendations, applying that understanding to everyday financial scenarios such as saving, budgeting and comparing options. Students will interact with in-game AI agents that offer recommendations, giving them practice in questioning and evaluating AI-generated input rather than accepting it automatically.

The project takes direct aim at a gap that��, an expert in instructional design, and��, who researches gaming, play and literacy, see in how AI literacy is currently taught in K-12 schools.

Most existing approaches lean on abstract conceptual explanations or standalone coding exercises, disconnected from the situations where children actually meet AI. Yet elementary-age students are already encountering algorithmically-targeted content and personalized recommendations daily, well before any formal instruction catches up to that reality.

By grounding AI literacy in the real-world context of personal finance, the project aims to teach students not just what AI is but when to trust its recommendations, when to question them and how to make informed decisions on their own.

The project also responds to a pressing need in New York State, where����must be implemented by the 2027-2028 school year. It centers on Central New York’s Fabius-Pompey school district, a rural, high-needs district where broadband access gaps and limited supplemental learning resources make a free, school-based platform especially valuable.

Following the FINDERS Foundry required stakeholder model, the leadership team brings together researchers, a K-12 educator, a technologist and a parent/guardian representative to co-design the platform alongside students, educators and families.

Over the two-month planning period, the team will pursue three outcomes: building students’ understanding of how AI systems work, strengthening their grasp of core personal finance concepts and developing their ability to critically evaluate AI-driven recommendations.

The work will culminate in a full development-phase proposal for November 2026, with an eye toward eventual regional and multi-state expansion through a future NSF Discovery Research PreK-12 proposal.

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.)