Undergraduate Research Program Focus of TU College of Science and Technology Magazine

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Last summer, I found myself in thigh-high waders making my way through a shallow creek near the Jenkintown train station. I was there to observe a Temple biology major and computer science major who were involved in aquatics research with Laura Toran, the Albert W. and Alice M. Weeks Chair in Environmental Geology. The two were among the 55 Temple College of Science and Technology students who participated in CST’s Undergraduate Research Program (URP) this past summer.

The URP provides some of the college’s most promising students with stipends of up to $4,000 to spend their summers working with faculty researchers; they also collaborate on research with the professors during the academic year. The resulting story, “Summer Means Research,” was the cover story (pp. 16-20) for the 2015 edition of Outlook, CST’s alumni magazine.

To write the story I conducted numerous interviews with students and faculty members from all five of CST’s departments, as well as with the program’s director. I also interviewed and highlighted URP success stories: graduates who have gone on to doctoral programs at such prestigious universities as Harvard, Yale and Johns Hopkins, and others who are now biotech researchers in California and at Philadelphia’s Wistar Institute.

As CST’s main freelance writer, I also wrote short profiles of three accomplished alumni (pp. 20-21) and collaborated on a story about the college’s new Professional Science Master’s degree program (pp. 13-15).

To view my work in the 2015 edition of Outlook, click here.

Temple College of Education Magazine Reduces Some Readers to Tears

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During the past year I provided complete editorial services—writing, editing and proofreading—for the Temple University College of Education’s Educator magazine. During that time I worked with the college’s development office to produce two 24-page issues.

For the spring 2015 issue, I spent a full day at Philadelphia’s Maritime Academy Charter High School—the nation’s largest maritime school, whose administration and staff features a lot of Temple alumni. I interviewed those administrators, teachers and students and while working with Temple photographer Joe Labolito. Other stories included a profile of alum Henry Tisdale, the president of South Carolina’s Claflin University, one of the nation’s finest historically black colleges and universities; and the appointment of James Earl Davis, the college’s former interim dean, as the first Bernard C. Watson Endowed Chair in Urban Education.

Highlights of the winter 2016 issue of the Educator included a feature story on the college’s plans to launch an early learning & interdisciplinary center for the immediate North Philadelphia community. A related story featured Temple students, including many education majors, who—as part of a program called Jumpstart—spend part of their afternoons teaching preschoolers in such neighborhoods as Kensington. That story, which included a Temple student whose father had died of cancer discovering one of her young charges was rebelling because he didn’t have a father, reportedly reduced some readers to tears.

The winter issue also included a profile of Marjorie Neff, an alum with one of the toughest jobs in all of Pennsylvania. She’s the first educator to lead the School Reform Commission, which oversees the School District of Philadelphia.

In addition, for both issues my services included interviewing undergrad and grad students for a first-person “Our Students Speak” section; writing and/or editing news stories; editing faculty essays and faculty and alumni notes; and proofreading copy.

Click here to view the spring 2015 issue of the Educator.

Click here to view the winter 2016 issue of the Educator.

Brandywine Health Foundation Annual Report Touts Pride of Place

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For more than a decade now I have been writing copy for the annual community report for the Brandywine Health Foundation, a dynamic nonprofit devoted to improving the health and well-being of the residents of the Coatesville, Pa., area—a hard-luck but resilient post-steel mill town that is an anomaly in one of the nation’s richest counties, Chester County.

This year’s report focuses on new efforts to provide mental health training to a wide array of school staff members and interested community members so that they can identify the signs of youths in crisis and refer them to the help they need. It also highlights the foundation’s support of several programs that are trying to eradicate racial birth disparities—disparities in which African American women are twice as likely as Caucasian and Hispanic women to give birth to low-weight babies.

To prepare the report, I worked closely with the foundation’s administrators and the graphic designer with whom I always prepare the report, Amy Pollack (www.twistnshout.com), to brainstorm and pull the report together. Besides interviewing various sources and writing the two main stories, I interviewed and profiled three groups of donors and volunteers; helped Frances M. Sheehan, the foundation’s president and CEO, to shape the annual message from her and the outgoing and incoming board chairs and helped edit other copy.

Besides posting the entire report on its website, the foundation also has posted two lead stories as separate online stories.

Click here to view the BHF 2015 Community Report.

American Archaeology Magazine Feature Focuses on 1897 Massacre of Protesting Coal Miners

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The winter issue of American Archaeology magazine contains a feature I wrote on the efforts of a team of University of Maryland archaeologists to shed more light on one of the deadliest labor incidents in U.S. history—the 1897 massacre of 25 unarmed, striking ethnic coal miners in Northeastern Pennsylvania’s anthracite region near Hazleton. “Remembering the Lattimer Massacre” also highlights the efforts of a team of graduate students led by Paul Shackel, the chair of the university’s Anthropology Department, to understand the hard lives of the miners of Italian and Eastern European descent, and of their families, as the miners continued to mine the anthracite throughout the first half of the 20th century.

To report the story, last July I visited a couple excavation sites—backyard garden plots and a backyard privy—slightly north of the massacre site. In late August I also visited Shackel’s laboratory on the College Park campus to examine some of the artifacts he and his students have unearthed during annual excavations the past few years at the miners’ homes.

As Shackel told me, the story is edgier than most archeology stories. That is because the article compares the racism the Italian and Eastern European immigrants faced with the animus a new influx of immigrants—mostly Latinos—have recently experienced in Hazleton at the hands of some of the descendants of the ethnic miners. Ten years ago Hazleton made national headlines when it enacted anti-immigrant ordinances, measures that subsequently have been struck down by federal courts.

The story also resonated on a personal level with me. My mother’s side of my family were descendants of Slovak coal miners who immigrated to Northeastern Pennsylvania in the late 1800s. My maternal grandfather even worked at the age of 11 sorting pieces of coal. Part of the joy of speaking with older residents of the coal “patch” town where the excavations were being conducted was listening to their soft upstate Pennsylvania accents. It was as if my grandparents and great aunts and uncles were once again speaking to me.

Click on the Lattimer Massacre to view a full PDF of the story.

 

 

Article in Temple’s College of Science and Technology Magazine Highlights Impressive Research Recruits

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One of the two main feature stories in the 2015 edition of Outlook, the magazine of Temple University’s College of Science and Technology, highlights the impressive new research faculty that the university lured away from Arizona State, Penn State, Rutgers and Tulane universities. “Collaborative Partnership: New Research Centers Blur Scientific Boundaries” is the fourth feature I’ve written in the past three years for Outlook, which contains two feature stories each issue.

This year’s feature was twinned with a story about the opening of the college’s new Science Education and Research Center, the largest interdisciplinary science building in the Philadelphia region, where most of the new researchers’ laboratories are housed. For the researchers, Temple’s allure included a critical mass of other top-notch researchers and the ability to mine and analyze huge data sets with the Temple’s ultra-fast, powerful High-Performance Computing Cluster and its related virtual server, TUcloud.

The professors featured in the story include:

  • Jody Hey, director of the Center for Computational Genetics and Genomics, which uses new genome sequencing data methods to study the divergence of populations, from fruit flies to apes to humans, particular the evolutionary history of human populations in Africa, and
  • S. Blair Hedges, a biologist who works to preserve biodiversity in Haiti
  • Ron Levy, director of the Center for Biophysics & Computational Biology, which focuses on developing new HIV pharmaceutical inhibitors
  • Sudhir Kumar, director of the Institute for Genomics and Evolutionary Medicine (iGEM), which explores the genetic components of diseases, and
  • John Perdew, a physicist who directs the Center for Materials Theory

With so many professors to feature, the challenge was to weave their disparate stories together in a narrative that gave each of the researchers their due while flowing smoothly from one researcher to the next.

Click here to view a full PDF of the story.

West Chester University’s 1st Annual Research Report

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Considering that West Chester University produces more teachers than any other college or university in Pennsylvania, it is not surprising to learn that its professors are engaged in cutting-edge research that focuses on enhancing the education of both school children and WCU’s own student teachers.

But from the helicopter’s historical role  in the Vietnam War to the physics involved in such soft-condensed matter as peanut butter and electrolyte issues for football players, WCU professors—with the help of their undergraduate research assistants—are also probing interesting questions that extend far beyond education.

These include projects focusing on art, anthropology, criminal justice and the training of costume designers and social workers. Getting that broader message out was the rationale for producing WCU’s 2013-14 “Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activities Annual Report”—the first such report the university has ever published. Intended audiences include the WCU community itself as well as research funders and such decision makers as state legislators.

Working with Gautam Pillay, the university’s associate vice president for research and sponsored programs, I interviewed and then wrote about the work of a dozen professors and four undergraduates to produce all but the introductory messages of the 20-page report. I was also responsible for obtaining copy approvals from all of the professors and students.

In addition, I got the assignment in the best way possible for a freelance writer—through a word-of-mouth referral from Ray Betzner, Temple University’s assistant vice president of university communications. He was familiar with a similar report I wrote several years ago on research efforts at Temple.

Click on WCU Research Annual Report to review a PDF.

Temple Today E-Newsletter Highlights Professors and Researchers

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Since last fall I have been contributing periodically to Temple Today, an online newsletter that is distributed five days a week to Temple University administrators, faculty and staff. In addition, the stories are also re-purposed to appear on the university’s home page, www.temple.edu, and on the home pages of the various colleges.

The 500- to 700-word articles have included:

  • an article about Mohammad Kiani, a professor of mechanical engineering, whose “pediatric brain on a chip” drug research testing device was hailed as one of the top 10 innovations of 2013 by The Scientist magazine
  • an article about Ron Levy, the director of Temple’s new Center for Biophysics and Computational Biology and an internationally renowned AIDS drug researcher, who conducts his investigations using high-performing computer clusters, and
  • an article about undergraduate anthropology students spending their winter break unearthing 5,000-year-old Bronze Age skeletons in Oman under the direction of Kimberly Williams, an assistant professor of anthropology and a skeletal biologist.
  • an article about award-winning teacher Jason Chein, an associate professor of psychology and a neuroscientist whose expertise includes functional MRIs, which noninvasively allow him to understand what’s going on inside our brains. His collaborative research with Professor Laurence Steinberg has made them the nation’s foremost experts regarding adolescents’ enhanced risk taking and led to graduated drivers’ licenses which limit the number of other teenagers that can be in a car when a teen is driving.

Profiling Jeanes Hospital Heart and Vascular Surgery Patients

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I spent several months last year speaking over the phone with a number of patients who had benefited from either heart or vascular surgery at Jeanes Hospital—the Temple University Health System hospital in Northeast Philadelphia that straddles the Montgomery County line. The project highlighted the fact that patients need not travel to the main Temple University Hospital in order to be operated on by Temple surgeons.

It was pretty much of a turnkey operation: working off a list of patients provided by the staff of the Temple Heart & Vascular Institute at Jeanes Hospital, I called quite a few patients and got additional background, when needed, from nurses, cardiologists and surgeons. In some cases, I did multiple interviews, following up with patients weeks or months after their procedures in order to be able to write about their full, successful recovery. Once I had drafted the stories, I also submitting them to the patients for their review and approval.

Ultimately, I produced 16 profiles. As of this writing, half of the profiles are already posted on the Jeanes Hospital website. I feel that I can put anybody at ease during an interview, and I believe that this project—which involved profiling patients ranging from a 35-year-old father of two who is a university administrator to retired blue-collar workers, grandmothers in their 70s and an 82-year-old retired auto dealer—illustrates that ability.

Click here to read the Jeanes Hospital patient profiles.

Annual Report Highlights Coatesville Health Foundation’s Role as Program Incubator

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For nearly a decade now I have been writing the copy for the Brandywine Health Foundation’s annual community report. The 2014 report focuses on the non-profit’s role as an incubator of programs that benefit the Coatesville community in Chester County.

Story highlights include the launch of the foundation’s Coatesville Youth Initiative—after five years of careful nurturing by the foundation—as a separate non-profit organization; a quick $1.2 million fundraising campaign designed to put the CYI on firm financial footing, endow a scholarship fund and launch a youth-directed community philanthropy program; and the merger of two of the foundation’s main grantees: ChesPenn (medical services) and Community Dental.

Beginning with a brainstorming meeting with the foundation staff in the summer, I and my longtime design partner on the project, Amy Pollack of Twistn’Shout Design, are intimately involved in every aspect of the report. Our involvement ranges from helping create each report’s theme to making sure that the relatively concise text—essentially three main stories that flow as one—completely synch up with the photos.

My responsibilities include interviewing a wide range of story subjects, including foundation officials, donors, grantees and the end-users who benefit from the services the foundation supports, such as dental patients and Coatesville high school students.

Finally, to help BHF maximize the value of the stories, I also expand on each of the report’s  highlights by creating separate stories that the foundation also features on its website.

Click here to see a full PDF of the Brandywine Health Foundation’s 2014 community report.

Click here to link to the website stories.

Closing the Achievement Gap Focus of Profiles in College of Education Magazine

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Once again, I wrote and/or edited almost all of the copy contained in the latest issue of the Temple University College of Education’s Educator magazine. The 24-page issue features two lengthy profiles of alumni:  Irving Scott, who leads the Bill and Melinda Gates’ Foundation’s $335 million Empowering Effective Teaching program; and Christopher McGinley, who this semester returned to co-lead the college’s principal certification program after serving for many years as a principal and administrator in the Philadelphia schools and then as superintendent in two suburban school districts.

Both stories focus on the educators’ efforts to address the achievement gap between white and minority students. For profiles, I like to focus on “Aha!” moments that prove to be seminal events in people’s lives and careers. For Scott, there were two: first, when he considered himself solely as an athlete, his 9th grade English teacher forced him to recite before his classmates two poems—one by Robert Frost, the other an original one she required Scott to write. His other key moment occurred while earning his master’s degree and principal’s certification at Temple, when he came upon the following quote by John Dewey that goes to the heart of the achievement gap issue: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children.”

McGinley’s hinge moment came when, as a new assistant superintendent in the suburban Cheltenham School District, he discovered that African American students there were suffering from the same tyranny of low expectations that also plagued Philadelphia’s minority students.

To report the stories, I interviewed Scott in both Philadelphia and his Gates Foundation offices in Washington, District of Columbia; I interviewed McGinley in his Philadelphia townhome and attended an evening class he taught at Temple’s Ft. Washington, Pennsylvania, campus.

Click here to see a full PDF of the Fall 2014 issue of the Educator.