Author: Elizabeth Gillooly

Seventeen George Mason Faculty Awarded 4-VA Grants

Through 4-VA@Mason, faculty from schools across George Mason University have embarked on new pilot research projects in collaboration with higher education institutions throughout Virginia. The 4-VA Collaborative Research Grants, first launched in the 2013-2014 academic year, are designed to forge relationships in Virginia higher education to leverage the strengths of each school, decrease working in silos, and launch novel research projects that can provide a springboard for future external funding. Other schools in the 4-VA system are the College of William and Mary, James Madison University, Old Dominion University, University of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University, Virginia Military Institute, and Virginia Tech. Christopher Newport University is also participating in Collaborative Research Grants.

During the 2024-25 year, nine of the Collaborative Research Grants are being led at George Mason and 11 faculty members will serve as co-PIs for research spearheaded at partner institutions. Janette Kenner Muir, Vice Provost, Academic Affairs and Campus Coordinator of 4-VA@Mason, notes that the 24-25 proposals were especially strong, “Each year, we are more and more impressed with the breadth and depth of the proposals providing our faculty this unique opportunity.”

The 4-VA@Mason 2024-25 Collaborative Research Grant awardees, proposal title and partner schools (in parentheses) are:

Christova, Rosalina; College of Science, Department of Environmental Science and Policy and Potomac Environmental Research and Education Center – Integrative Characterization of the Anatoxin-a-Producing Benthic Cyanobacterial Genus Microcoleus in the Shenandoah River (UVA/Wise)

Croitoru, Arie; College of Science, Department of Computational and Data Sciences & Center for Social Complexity – Quantum-Inspired Modeling for Understanding Social Complexity (ODU)

Kabbani, Nadine; College of Science, School of Systems Biology – Proteomic profiling of molecular changes associated with chemotherapy induced neuropathy (VCU)
Lee, Myeong; College of Engineering and Computing, Department of Information Sciences and Technology – Understanding Multidimensional Measures of Social Capital: Impacts of Ethnic Heterogeneity, Social Classes, and Historical Legacies of Urban Policy (VCU)
Luke, Rayanne; College of Science, Department of Mathematical Sciences – Data-Driven Modeling of the Time-Dependent Immune Response to Infection and Vaccination (UVA)
Madden, Amanda; College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of History – Historical Mapathons: Team-Based GIS Training and Transformation of Seventeenth Century Maps (VT)
Nam, Sang; College of Visual and Performing Arts, Computer Game Design Program – Developing A Multimodal LLM AI Agent for the XR, Extended Reality Platform for Personalized and Highly Immersive Trauma Training (UVA)
Zhang, Xiaokuan; College of Engineering and Computing, Department of Computer Science – Uncovering Secrets from Virtual Reality Headsets via Electromagnetic Side Channels (VT)
Zhang, Xijin (Emma); College of Engineering and Computing, Department of Civil, Environmental and Structural Engineering – Multifunctional Fungi-Based Biosurfactants for Durable Concrete Structures (UVA)

The following Mason faculty received funding as Co-PIs for the 24-25 academic year collaborating with other 4-VA institutions (in parentheses):

Bagheri, Shaghayegh; Mechanical Engineering – MOMENTUM: Assessing the Merits of Personalized Feedback with Generative AI for Foundational Engineering Mechanics Courses (VT)
Bloom, Michael S.; Global and Community Health – A new green space exposure index utilizing AI methods and an eye-tracking device (VT)
Bray, Harrison and Lukyanenko, Anton; Mathematical Sciences – Collaborative workshops in topology (UVA)
Dong, Pei; Mechanical Engineering – Printing of Ultrathin Conductive Films on Liquid for 3D Wearable Electronic (UVA)
Otis, Jessica; History and Lawrence, Heidi; English/Medical Rhetoric – Human Dimensions of Infectious Diseases (VT)
Yang, Jingyuan; Costello College of Business – Building Machine Learning Resilience During Disasters (UVA)

Researchers Develop Computational Models to Support Successful Organization of Local Events

As illustrated in Robert Putnam’s renowned book “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,” Americans have become increasingly isolated over the decades, often spending leisure time alone without social gatherings. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this issue of isolation was exacerbated, calling further attention to the public health crisis of loneliness and isolation in the United States.

To help encourage in-person gatherings, Event-Based Social Networks (EBSNs), such as Meetup.com and Facebook Events, have become an increasingly vital tool for facilitating these occasions based on shared interests — ranging from farmers’ markets to game nights. To maximize the effectiveness of EBSNs, a group of Mason faculty members with interests in community engagement, machine learning, and geographical data analysis wanted to take a closer look at how these arranged local gatherings fluctuated depending on community and group characteristics. They were able to undertake this analysis following the approval of their 4-VA@Mason Collaborative Research Grant proposal entitled “AI for AI: Toward Community-level Human-AI Collaborations in Local Meetups.”

Led by Myeong Lee, Mason’s Assistant Professor of Information Science and the Director of the Community Informatics Lab, the researchers also included former College of Science faculty members Olga Gkountouna, who assisted with machine learning model development, and Ron Mahabir who provided insight on geographical data analysis. Amr Hilal of Virginia Tech helped with data analytics from a machine learning perspective.

While it is known that EBSN users’ participation in Meetup events are influenced by group organizers’ promotions and event frequency, the effects of ecological factors, such as the number of similar groups surrounding a Meetup group, had not been previously studied. The goals of the project were to quantitatively examine how EBSN groups’ ecological features shape the performances of Meetup groups within that organizational ecology. They also wanted to create baseline benchmarks for how state-of-the art AI technologies can predict Meetup groups’ success.

To do so, the team conducted two studies of Meetup data for 500 cities in the US, extracting factors pertaining to “Meetup niches,” which considers similar groups surrounding a Meetup location.

The results revealed intriguing patterns, one of which was that if a Meetup group’s description resembles other groups in their geographical area, it tends to attract more participants. In a second finding, the team implemented three advanced machine learning models to predict the success of local Meetup groups, finding that the performances of these prediction models vary across different categories and cities, with some outperforming the state-of-the-art models.

“Overall, our research during the 4-VA project period will provide a basis for understanding human-AI collaboration at the community level by revealing how various factors shape and predict the success of local groups,” says Lee.

Lee credits the success of their findings to a strong team of student researchers, including graduate students Julia Hsin-Ping Hsu who worked on developing deep learning models and ecological features and Ishana Shinde who assisted in calculating community-level features. Undergraduates Victoria Gonzales focused on descriptive statistics of variables; Joel Adeniji managed visualization; and Nnamdi Ojibe handled data cleaning and geographical data aggregation.

The group is now disseminating their findings in the field – one study was published at the International Conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T), and the other is under submission to a premier journal. Lee is planning to write an external NSF grant using the preliminary results from the research, proposing the curation of Meetup-based social gathering data with the promising community-level ecological factors.

“The 4-VA@Mason grant significantly helped me and my team jump-start the project and develop the research studies,” says Lee. “What’s more, it allowed the team to connect with researchers outside of Mason to discuss additional meaningful community-based topics, thus broadening our future possibilities.”

Modeling Green Infrastructure to Ensure Urban Sustainability

Green infrastructure (GI), utilizing plant or soil systems, permeable pavement, and other mitigators to filter and absorb stormwater where it falls, is a topic of interest to a variety of stakeholders. City and local government officials, utility and engineering companies, and environmental organizations as well as private citizens recognize the need to reduce potentially dangerous and contaminated water flows to sewer systems or surface waters.

Efficient stormwater management in highly urbanized communities is especially critical, considering how floods and droughts could be caused or exacerbated by climate change. However, creating an effective model to examine runoff possibilities requires careful consideration of a wide array of factors including climate data, soil types, water flow patterns, and current land usage. Furthermore, it is imperative that other elements — geographic, demographic, economic, and ecological — be factored into the model.

That was just the challenge Younsung Kim in Mason’s Department of Environmental Science and Policy wanted to take on. Kim, who has an extensive background in complex environmental and sustainability issues, saw the potential of incorporating freely available data from US Geological Society and Census Bureau along with the local county government land use zoning data to create a computational spatial model to help identify what works, and what doesn’t work, in GI.

Kim also recognized the importance of applying the prototype in a real-world setting. To do so, she and her research team identified several eastern Fairfax County locations along the Route 1 corridor in Virginia, including the communities of Huntington, Waynewood, and Fort Hunt to illustrate how the model might work. Finally, Kim wanted to incorporate today’s trends in GI architecture in the research; identifying UVA’s School of Architecture as a leading source of urban planning and spatial analysis expertise.

This robust goal was brought to fruition after Kim’s proposal “Assessing Green Infrastructure Potential Using Multi-level Ecological and Economic Factors: The Northern Virginia Case” won a 4-VA@Mason Collaborative Research Grant. Kim’s co-PI at UVA, Vanessa Guerra, received a 4-VA Complementary Grant for her work on the project.

Kim also tapped a number of other sources, including Alex Iszard and Greg Farley in Mason’s Facilities Administration, who offered their GI perspective from a facility management standpoint.

Kim’s PhD student Colin Chadduck assisted in the development of the computational model, studying the ecological and economic factors important for GI site identification. Mason undergraduate students Caroline Miller, Dahvi E Hochman, and Nicolas Bataille provided data collection and literature review support. Undergraduate Sunho Oh played the same role at UVA. Additionally, Elizabeth Grant, formerly a professor at Virginia Tech, advised on the subject of experimental designs of green roof systems.

Together, the team developed a proven successful computational model incorporating ecological and economic dimensions for GI placement which has received national and international attention.

The research outcomes were presented at the American Society for Public Administration Annual Conference, the Midwest Political Science Association Conference, and at a Mason Earth Day event. A paper entitled “Mapping Green Infrastructure from Stormwater” was published in Environmental Pollution and Climate Change.

Based on the spatial analysis method developed on the project, Kim won a grant from the Korea International Cooperation Agency to develop resilience enhancement action programs for climate refugee communities in the Philippines.

The project now extends to increase public awareness. Kim and her students are developing a GI webpage that will include resources and a video clip focusing on green infrastructure.

“This 4-VA@Mason grant has created results-oriented direction for GI within Fairfax County, the Commonwealth of Virginia, and beyond; and cemented a long-term collaborative relationship between our environmental policy research group here at Mason and the environmental planning lab at UVA,” noted Kim. “We believe our results have far-reaching possibilities and impact on urban sustainability.”

4-VA Team Applies Novel Technology to Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Incorporating control-theoretic methods into neuroscientific research was the interest that brought together Xuan Wang, Assistant Professor in Mason’s Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Mainak Patel, Assistant Professor of Mathematics at William and Mary. Supported by a 4-VA grant, the two wanted to look closer at adapting cutting edge technology in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to create a new approach to facilitate the prediction and regulation of the firing rate dynamics of brain neurons. The real-world application of this research is to facilitate brain disease treatment, such as epilepsy, and brain-computer interface.

“As a result of this project, we have developed two network models, a firing rate dynamics model describing the microscale neuronal activities of the brain; and another to measure the small changes in blood flow that occur with brain activity,” explains Wang. “We have also created an effective data-driven algorithm that can reconstruct and predict the rate and fMRI dynamics of the brain.”

Wang and Patel received human brain fMRI data from United States Naval Academy through Assistant Professor Duy Duong-Tran and support from Li Shen, Professor of Informatics in Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Results of the research have been publicly shared via two abstracts at the Organization for Human Brain Mapping conference. Follow-up work submitted to the 2024 Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention Conference is currently under review. Another paper on the project was submitted to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Transaction on Automatic Control and is currently being considered for publication.

Graduate student Muhammad Umair (left), who gathered and processed fMRI and firing rate data for the research, won first place at the College of Engineering and Computing Innovation Week at Mason with a poster titled ‘Subject and Task Fingerprint using Dynamic Reconstruction from fMRI Time-series Data’.

Based on the results of the 4-VA project, Shen, Duong-Tran, and Wang are currently preparing a National Science Foundation grant proposal for more extensive research.

“Thanks to the seed funding from 4-VA, my collaborators were able to jump-start our research. We successfully validated preliminary hypotheses and will now leverage our findings further. Currently, we are in the process of applying for larger grants to sustain and expand our efforts on this topic,” adds Wang.

4-VA@Mason Funded Project Creates Professional Learning Series to Support Inclusive Classroom Co-teaching

Almost 10% of Virginia’s students aged 6-21 are identified as students with disabilities. Of this group, almost 68% spend the majority of their school day in inclusive, general education classrooms receiving special education services through co-teaching partnerships of general and special education teachers.

Observations of this teaching arrangement, however, reveal challenges faced by special education teachers who often simply act as an assistant. Consequently, they are often not able to deliver the specially designed instruction necessary to meet the learning needs of the student with disabilities. Co-teachers often do not understand the expectations for this scenario, or they have not received the professional learning appropriate for their classroom. Without a true co-teaching partnership, the achievement outcomes for students may not be met.

This dilemma had been on the mind of Margaret Weiss, Associate Professor of Special Education at Mason who has long researched co-teaching and pre-service teacher preparation. She saw an acute need to develop and then test a hybrid professional learning series to prepare general and special education teachers in secondary inclusive classrooms to implement effective co-teaching practices.

In projecting out this need, Weiss knew that longtime colleague Wendy Rodgers, an Associate Professor at VCU, would be the perfect collaborator. Rogers specializes in inclusive classrooms, co-teaching, learning disabilities, single-case design methods, collaboration, and classroom observation. As VCU is a partner in the 4-VA network, Weiss was able to invite Rodgers to join her in a 4-VA proposal as a co-principal investigator, which was subsequently greenlighted by the 4-VA@Mason Advisory Board.

Weiss and Rodgers began by assembling a team including graduate student Karli Zilberfarb at VCU and Holly Glaser from Mason for module development and production, and Boris Gafurov at Mason to develop applications. Together, they created five professional learning modules which include information, readings, checklists, sample lesson plans, reflection documents, video samples from teacher classrooms, and application activities for teachers who are learning to co-teach together. The series was then pilot tested by teachers at Liberty High School in Fauquier County, Va. Although not originally planned, the 4-VA team also developed a web-based, shareable co-teaching lesson planning application that is also being pilot tested in local schools.

Weiss enlisted the help of Virtual Virginia’s Steven Sproles as module host and the Virginia Department of Education Training and Technical Assistance Center at Mason for further review of materials.

Upon presentation to teachers, the series was especially well received and was found to be very helpful as the procedures were implemented in classrooms. Weiss notes, “It has been great to be able to create these materials. We are very excited about reactions we have from school divisions and professionals in Virginia and beyond.” (School divisions in North Carolina and Georgia have already shown an interest in the program.)

Continues Weiss, “This 4VA grant was a fantastic opportunity for Wendy and me to bring our ideas to fruition; we had not been able to dedicate the time and energy to making it happen before this grant. I am hoping that this pilot study will set us up in a great position to apply for a significant external funding award.”

NEH Award Expands 4-VA Piloted Project

The National Endowment for the Humanities recently awarded $220,000 to a project originally funded by 4VA@Mason to focus on a deeper approach to teaching the history of higher education in the United States. Thanks to 4-VA’s seed funding, this research developed at the state level will now be propelled onto a national platform.

“Reimagining the History of Higher Education in the Digital Age,” was awarded a 4-VA@Mason Collaborative Research Grant in 2020, proposed by professor of higher education Kelly Schrum. Virginia Tech assistant professor Chase Catalano also received a 4-VA Complementary Grant at that time to launch the project in Blacksburg.

Once off the ground in 2021, colleagues at William and Mary, James Madison, and Old Dominion were interested in joining the endeavor, with Ben Boone, Art Dean, and Kim Bullington and Bill Nuckols, respectively, at the helm. WM, JMU, and ODU faculty also received 4-VA support for their contribution to the research.

Collaborating with Schrum at Mason is Nate Sleeter, Director of Educational Projects at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media.

Since the outset of the project, participating faculty, students, and student researchers have curated more than 100 primary sources, created asynchronous learning activities for the course, collected input from history of higher education instructors, and developed an extremely well-received database of resources for the project website, the History of Higher Education: An Open Educational Resource — higheredhistory.gmu.edu.

In addition to primary and secondary sources, the website contains an invaluable database of institutional archives with digitized historical content, including yearbooks. Seven hundred institutional archives are cataloged on the site, including 48 Hispanic-Serving Institutions, 24 Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and 15 women’s colleges. Additionally, the list includes 63 community colleges — especially important given the historic lack of attention to these institutions.

Recognizing the value of this new approach to more fully understand the history of higher education, the NEH grant will allow the 4-VA collaborators to expand the project https://unpacking.chss.gmu.edu/ and to conduct a Summer 2024 four-week institute, “Unpacking the History of Higher Education in the United States,” designed to improve the history of higher education courses nationally and to deepen humanities engagement among future higher education leaders.

“This project has been a wonderful exercise in collaboration and research,” concludes Schrum. “Working together and leveraging the resources at each university through 4-VA made this effort a success.”

Globalization in Reverse: A Look at the Diffusion of K-Pop in the United States

Over the last decade, Korean pop culture (K-pop) has swept the United States with unexpected and unprecedented popularity. However, an investigation behind the supra-ethnic and cross-border nature of this explosion of interest is almost nonexistent in literature and within Virginia research universities where the Asian student population has grown dramatically in recent years.

To look closer at this phenomenon, Byunghwan Son in Mason’s Global Affairs Program was interested in creating an intellectual space where systematic research on contemporary Asian and Asian American studies subjects could be nurtured and fostered. To do so, he turned to a 4-VA@Mason Collaborative Research Grant for funding to build on data he had already collected between 2019-2021. His objective was to conduct additional interviews necessary to glean a more in-depth understanding of the cross-ethnic and -racial nature of K-pop. Son’s plan was to coordinate faculty at Mason and UVA to recruit and advise graduate and undergraduate students to conduct the work, providing rich research opportunities. These opportunities would include collecting, cleaning, and coding interview data of K-pop fans in North America.

Two of Son’s colleagues at Mason — Dae Young Kim, Associate Professor in Sociology & Anthropology and Young A Jung, Assistant Professor in Modern and Classical Languages –- supported the student research and acted as mentors. Senior Lecturer Yoon Hwa Choi at UVA joined the project to do the same. “We were committed to galvanizing and enhancing the scholarly collaboration between Mason and UVA researchers at both the faculty and student levels,” explained Son.

Armed with the 4-VA grant, the team got to work. Nine students at Mason and two at UVA were recruited to undertake the goal of interviewing 50 fans of K-pop music to provide more insight for their research. “The success of our project was due in large part to the effectiveness and competence of the research assistants. They were key to this effort,” says Son.

Faculty and Students Studying K-pop fans in the US

The research revealed interesting results. “We recognized a number of important commonalities amongst the K-Pop enthusiasts — these fans found untraditional types of genders in K-pop artists, were torn between their own racial identities and their loyalty to the artists (which often didn’t align very well), lean liberal ideologically but remain reluctant to make direct political actions and have found a new place of belonging in the fan communities,” notes Son.

Mason students participating in the research were graduate student J. Orisha and undergraduates Kennedy Pendlebury, Janai Byrd, Alexus Kelley, Sarah Lepre, Nida Nawaz, Pilar Gore, Kiah Percy, Sohee Kim, and Yoo Jeong Seong. At the time of the research both Kim and Seong were students studying on the Mason Korea campus.

Working with Choi at UVA were undergrads Anusha Choudhary and Jessica Caroline Ross.

“This grant gave us the opportunity to collect an exceptionally rich amount of interview data on K-pop fans. Not only is our interview data larger in numbers and wider in scope than any previous study we know of, but each of the interviews also engages the fans in significantly deeper and more intricate ways. We attribute much of this innovation to the cross-university collaboration of 4-VA as it enabled us to reach some of the interviewees that we otherwise would not have recruited.”

A paper outlining the research was presented to the Eastern Sociological Society (ESS). Currently, the PIs are submitting their data to peer-reviewed academic journals.

Ethical Data Analytics: Investigating Data as a Pedagogical Practice for the Humanities

While data analysis is critical to any research, it is important that users are acutely aware of what is behind the data — including the moral obligations regarding the gathering and protection of the data. It is recognized that researchers should be informed about ethical sources and uses of data and understand both the potentially marginalized voices and the audiences within the dataset. Faculty at four 4-VA partner schools (VT, ODU, JMU and Mason) coalesced around the need to raise awareness about the opportunities and limitations in data analytics as an area of research and practice for the field of humanities. Moreover, they were interested in building a methodological framework for humanities instructors.

As the team saw it, the need for critical data literacy should not be limited to data scientists or engineers. Communicators, designers, developers, artists, historians, and more are asked to make sense of increasingly complex data sets. They were interested in developing practice-oriented pedagogical resources to enable instructors to support students as they seek jobs and internship opportunities throughout the state. In this way, they could add diverse voices to the technology sector and Women in Tech opportunities, especially for students who are not able to afford an engineering degree.

The project was led by Mason’s Nupoor Ranade, Assistant Professor in the Department of English. Ranade was joined by ODU’s Daniel Richards, Associate Professor, Department of English; JMU’s Ja’La Wourman Assistant Professor, School of Writing, Rhetoric & Technical Communication: and VT’s Sweta Baniya, Assistant Professor, Department of English.

Armed with a 4-VA grant, the group set to work on the planning and execution of a one-day workshop for delivery at each of the four campuses. Targeted attendees included tenure-track and non-tenure track faculty, post-doctoral scholars, graduate teaching and research assistants and graduate students. The co-PIs acted as organizers at their respective institutions and were present for the workshops.

The workshops were delivered during April 2023 and were very well received, garnering many positive results. Attendees left the workshops with specifically designed training materials including PowerPoint presentations and handouts.

The team’s next objective was to disseminate the workshop resources and results to the broader community, which came to fruition through their website https://www.innovationsindata.org/.

They then presented part of their findings at the International Society of Technical Communication’s Summit in Atlanta in May 2023, which resulted in numerous messages from industry practitioners interested in collaborating on further opportunities to add to the research. They have also shared the workshop summary and workshop outcomes at the Association of Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Design of Communication October conference in Orlando, Fla.

“This grant gave Daniel, Ja’La, Sweta and I an opportunity to develop and share concrete pedagogical resources with Virginia faculty (and beyond) that will enable humanities researchers and students incorporate data analytics studies in human-centered audience analysis,” concludes Ranade. “It looks like this is just the beginning!”

4-VA@Mason Collaborative Research Grant Applications Now Accepted

Calls for proposals are now open for Mason faculty interested in launching pilot research projects in conjunction with colleagues at one or more of the universities within the 4-VA system in Virginia. These Collaborative Research Grants (CRG) are designed to facilitate and support alliances which leverage the strengths of each partner university to improve efficiencies in research and higher education; reduce working in silos; and provide hands-on experiential opportunities for students. Other 4-VA institutions include William and Mary, James Madison, Old Dominion, Virginia Commonwealth, Virginia Military Institute, Virginia Tech, and the University of Virginia.

The program is designed to encourage the development of baseline research projects in the sciences and humanities which could help fuel future research and funding. “The 4-VA Collaborative Research Grant program provides our Mason faculty an important first step to bring to life a research endeavor that will benefit our students, higher education, and citizens statewide and beyond,” explains Vice Provost, Academic Affairs and 4-VA@Mason Campus Coordinator Janette Muir.

Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis through February 15, 2024. Further information can be found at https://4va.gmu.edu/grants/.

4-VA Team Develops Communication Center Tutor Training

While Communication Centers on college campuses are a relatively new concept — they were originally introduced to provide student support for basic communication and public speaking courses — over the last 20 years they have exploded in number have expanded offerings to include a wide range of communication skills assistance. Although the model has been widely credited for a range of student accomplishments, there is a recognition that overburdened faculty charged with operating the centers suffered from the lack of time and resources necessary to create and deliver suitable training materials for tutors. This challenge was faced at the Communication Centers located on several 4-VA campuses — Mason, JMU, and VT.

Shelby Broberg, Communication Center Director on Mason’s Fairfax campus, connected with Paul Mabry, Communication Center Coordinator and Assistant Professor at JMU, and VT’s Brandi Quesenberry, Director of Undergraduate Programs and Zack Sowder, Advanced Instructor and Associate Director at VT’s CommLab to see how they might lessen the training needs bottlenecks using a 4-VA grant.

“Shelby’s vision to work in collaboration with her partners at JMU and Tech exemplifies how 4-VA can work for higher education in Virginia,” says Janette Muir, Vice Provost, Academic Affairs, and 4-VA@Mason Campus Coordinator. “By sharing resources, strengths, and workloads, this team has created a training package that is a valuable tool for both faculty and students.”

The project began with an extensive survey of 53 Communication Center Administrators and 35 Communication Center Consultants. Explains Broberg, “Through our research we were able to conclude that the majority of communication centers in the nation need a more cohesive, effective, and accessible training program for their consultants.”

They then developed open-access training materials with ten modules of interactive content for communication center consultants: https://sbroberg.wixsite.com/communication-center. “This content was largely sourced and developed by our undergraduate students who participate in training and have extensive experience as the target audience for these educational materials,” noted Broberg. The students were Sabeen Akhtar, Erandy Cruz-Alcantara, Erin Hess, Fadzayi Sambana, and Kamryn Satterfield from Mason; and Heather Opie, Sara Montgomery, Riley Miller, Grace Warren, and Tessa Cyrus from JMU.

Broberg credited graduate students Briana Stewart, Aditi Goel, and Neha Gour of Mason and Mercy Faleyimu of JMU for leading the undergraduate team.

The project and results were presented at the National Association of Communication Centers (NACC) Conference last spring in Blacksburg, Va, and recently at the National Communication Association conference in National Harbor, Md. Broberg reports, “The response was really exciting. Directors from centers all across the country were grateful for the new resources to help training be more consistent and reliable nationwide.”

The Communication Center Training Team at the National Communication Association conference — L to R: Mercy Faleyimu (JMU), Brandi Quesenberry (VT), Shelby Broberg (Mason) Zack Sowder (JMU)

The 4-VA project will now be extended to two other areas identified as needing support within Communication Centers — working with multilingual clients and STEM related content. “This is somewhat unsurprising as our college campuses continue to become more linguistically diverse and current trends of popular majors include STEM-related studies,” says Broberg.

“We believe these resources will meet a crucial need for Communication Centers to train their consultants to provide expert feedback to the diverse needs of students we see on campuses across the country,” concludes Broberg. “Participants have been incredibly enthusiastic and there has been a great deal of interest in the outcomes of our 4-VA supported research.”