Category: Featured Stories

4-VA Team Develops Rhetorical Approach to Counter Distrust in Blood Transfusions

As the healthcare industry wrestled with vaccine denial during and after the pandemic, another related concern emerged. For some Americans, a new form of skepticism grew around blood transfusion. This population perceives that blood banks and the blood supply are unsafe due to donations from those vaccinated against COVID and subsequently protest receiving a blood transfusion even when medically necessary.

Both vaccines and the blood supply system sit at the crossroads of public health services and private decision-making. To be successful, patients must trust in the system, which necessitates strong community connections and clear messaging. A broken link in the communication structure can have dire consequences.

In George Mason’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Heidi Lawrence – who has long researched the rhetoric of medical and scientific controversies – and Julie Gerdes at Virginia Tech – who focuses on health communication -decided to team up to address this compelling, novel issue. Although Lawrence knew Gerdes, a 4-VA collaborative partnership would allow them to join forces and get the support they needed for this important research. 4-VA leadership at George Mason and Tech agreed, and the pair were awarded a grant to launch the effort.

Their goal was ambitious. They wanted to study this predicament in the field of hematology and transfusion medicine within a framework of communication; produce rhetorically informed appropriate responses and create a framework for investigating and countering similar problems with blood donation and vaccine refusal at other sites.

Lawrence and Gerdes asked graduate students Jessie Wiggins at Mason and Temitope Ojedele-Adejumo at Tech to join them in the project.

The group identified several crucial objectives for their research:

Analyze vaccine concerns expressed on websites, in social media, through podcasts, and other sources to identify misunderstandings about vaccines and blood.
Conduct interviews with clinicians who experienced patient blood refusal.
Observe transfusion medicine rounds presentations, onsite blood banks, blood testing facilities, bloodless surgery, emergency blood services, and other components relevant to blood collection and storage.
Interview patients who expressed unease about blood products and vaccine safety.

To do so, it was imperative that they conduct the research in situ at a leading healthcare facility to fully study the rhetorical context of this phenomenon. A premiere hospital system in the Midwest United States was interested in collaborating on the project. The Mason and VT team donned their hospital scrubs and got to work with the facility’s Department of Transfusion Medicine.

Gerdes, Ojedele-Adejumo, Wiggins and Lawrence outside surgery

Following a thorough assessment over months of time, the researchers identified several critical actions, and potential pitfalls, in the development of a successful communication approach to the targeted patient group.

First, they determined it was vitally important to direct patients to reputable networks and sources of information on the blood supply system. Additionally, they found that having a trusted physician engage in an extended discussion with the patient helped address and allay specific concerns. (It was recognized, however, that there is often not the time, structure, or training for a clinician to adequately implement this step. Further, the blood system is very complex and demands for specific patient accommodations are often difficult to fulfill.) One interesting observation during the onsite work was that the patient interviews positively influenced the patient’s perception of their care. Patients were grateful for the chance to tell their stories to Gerdes and Lawrence and reported that the interviews and discussions helped to restore appreciation for and trust in the hospital.

Although Lawrence’s and Gerdes’ study is still ongoing and they continue to recruit more patient interviews, the results and guidelines have already been enthusiastically received at the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) Annual Conference and at the Center for Emerging Zoonotic and Arthropod-Borne Pathogens annual symposium. They are also working on a paper for a key industry journal. The project also has received continued 4-VA at Virginia Tech to support collaboration with Tom Ewing on his “Human Dimensions of Infectious Disease” project. This spinoff supports two additional undergraduate research assistants, Hailey Richards at Tech and Katy Morejon Portillo at Mason.

Lawrence praises the 4-VA support at George Mason and Tech which brought the project to fruition. “We never would have been able hire our graduate students and to conduct the site visit without 4-VA. Our time at the hospital brought the complexities of the clinical experiences—for patients and physicians—to life,” Lawrence explains. “Those firsthand encounters allowed us to truly understand the gravity of the situation many patients find themselves in, and the physicians recognized the importance of working across departments to give every patient the best care possible.”

George Mason Team Identifies Technology to Enhance Artificial Photosynthesis

When a 4-VA Collaborative Research Grant results in the production of a novel concept for technology solutions to support energy and climate issues, while also sharing resources and data between higher education institutions in Virginia and providing faculty and student research opportunities, it is another win for the program.

This was achieved following 4-VA’s approval of a proposal by George Mason’s Yun Yu, an Assistant Professor in Chemistry and Biochemistry Department, for a grant entitled Nanoscale Visualization of Electrocatalytic Carbon Dioxide Reduction Activity at Cu Nanocatalysts. Yu’s goal was to investigate options in catalytic electrode materials to improve and enhance electrocatalysis, a process essential for harnessing sustainable energy sources for artificial photosynthesis. While nanostructures are currently recognized as the most successful catalyst for many chemical reactions, there is more to understand about tailoring their crystalline planes to improve activity and selectivity.

Yu wanted to gain deeper insights into various nanocatalysts used in carbon removal technologies. The conventional approach to conducting this study often involves measuring the entire catalyst, composed of numerous small particles with varying sizes and shapes. However, critical information, such as the impact of heterogeneities on performance, is often lost in such ensemble measurements. Yu saw the potential for leveraging the the nanoscale scanning electrochemical microscopy on the George Mason campus to obtain detailed surface reactivity maps of nanocatalysts. However, to do so, Yu needed to acquire shape-controlled nanostructures, including copper nanowires, copper nanocubes, and nickel–iron layered nanosheets. He did so through a partnership with Sen Zhang, Associate Professor of Chemistry at UVA.

Yu’s team, graduate student Dan Tran and undergraduate students Solyip Kim, Melissa Nguyen, and Mackenzie Dickinson played a key role in the project, receiving funding and real-world research experience. Together, they identified furfural reduction, an important reaction for sustainable biofuel generation. They noted a distinct contrast in activity between copper and graphite support. “These preliminary experiments have demonstrated the viability of our scanning electrochemical technique in spatially resolving catalytic activity across nanoscopic structures,” explains Yu. They further expanded the application to the study of nickel–iron catalysts. “Our data suggested that adding trace amount of cerium oxide to the catalysts significantly enhances water oxidation activity. We would not have these insights without this powerful electroanalytical technique.” says Yu.

The initial results have provided Yu with a springboard to develop external grant proposals to systematically study the role of cerium oxide and quantify the effects of its loading on the apparent catalytic activity of the developed catalysts. “This 4-VA opportunity allowed us to create a partnership with UVA, create a team to implement further investigation via George Mason’s nanoscale scanning electrochemical microscopy, and now apply for further funding to move this project forward,” concludes Yu.

Pictured in Featured Image: Graduate student Dan Tran operating the scanning electrochemical microscope.

4-VA@Mason Award Produces Important Results in Childhood Working Memory Research

In the Developing Minds Lab at George Mason, Sabine Doebel says she has a dream job. As an undergraduate, she became fascinated by children’s thinking and how it changes with age. Now, as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, where she directs the Lab, she spends much of her time designing studies to understand how young children learn to think and act flexibly — that is, how they develop ‘executive function’ skills. Although these skills are vital to children’s success in school and beyond, much remains unknown about their development.

Particularly important for academic success is working memory — the capacity to maintain and manipulate information of known words, numbers, and other symbols. Working memory is often measured using tests including the Backward Digit Span, in which children repeat increasingly long sequences of digits in backwards order. “I have always been interested in how experience may shape working memory skills,” says Doebel. She was particularly curious about how early learning experiences at home— specifically in the domains of literacy and numeracy — could foster growth in working memory span.

Through an earlier 4-VA award, Doebel had the opportunity to share this new project idea with her colleague and mentor, Angeline Lillard, a widely respected developmental psychologist and researcher in the Department of Psychology at UVA. Explains Doebel, “Our collaboration would not have taken off the way it did if it hadn’t been for Angeline, because she was the one who sent me an email about 4-VA. She said, ‘Have you heard of 4-VA? We should consider this option.’”

When 4-VA@Mason approved Doebel’s proposal “How Does Experience Support Working Memory Development?” the team got to work. Doebel’s lab recruited and tested over 100 children on four different variations of the backward span tasks. Parents also completed a detailed survey reporting frequency and variety in various home learning practices. Lillard leveraged her own participant pool and school connections to recruit an additional sample of conventionally schooled and Montessori-educated children.

Doebel enlisted Mason undergraduate student Jordan Hassani and PhD student Nicole Stucke to collect the data. Hassani created the survey, tested the children, and coded the data. Stucke, who has functioned as the Developing Minds lab manager, helped with testing. Other team members, including Mason undergraduate Scarlett Bird-Guerra, were involved in community-based recruitment efforts.

UVA undergraduate Maksud Juraev and graduate student Abigail Kissinger led the UVA data collection efforts.

The team noted that the results were both predicted and surprising. As expected, they found that children show larger backward spans for items that are relatively familiar—for example, performance on trials that involved the digits 1, 2, 3 was better than on trials involving 7, 8, 9. However, while Doebel expected that children who engaged in more numeracy practices at home might show better performance on a backward span task involving digits, this was not found to be evident. Instead, it was observed that the backward digit span was related to home literacy practices, and that this was true even after accounting for effects of other home learning practices and age.

Doebel presented the findings at the American Psychological Association and at the Society for Research on Child Development. She plans to submit manuscripts to academic journals in the field.

Next up for the team is to dive deeper into Lillard’s connections in Charlottesville with Montessori schools to test whether children who are Montessori-educated show larger backward digit spans than children who are educated in conventional schools, as expected given the emphasis Montessori schools place on literacy and numeracy.

Doebel reflects on the relationships and growth experienced through the 4-VA project, “As a result of this funding, my students have progressed in their career trajectories — Jordan is now at the University of Maryland as a research coordinator in a NIH-funded lab, and he’s hoping to gain admittance to a Ph.D. program in clinical psychology. He got that opportunity in part because he participated in this project through 4-VA where he engaged real research experience.”

The original project has also led to a further study that will investigate the role of language in working memory by exploring how bilingual children with varying degrees of exposure to numerical language perform on the backward digit span task. This project is led by Victoria Rabii, a rising second year PhD student in the Applied Developmental Psychology program who is co-mentored by Doebel and Dr. Adam Winsler and funded by a Presidential Scholarship. The goal of the project is to better understand how young children’s working memory performance may be affected by their proficiency with relative linguistic concepts. “Previously, when children scored low on the task it was pretty common for this to be interpreted as indicating low working memory ability. But now things are changing a bit and we are asking whether children may show better performance if they are more fluent with the content that is integral to the task,” says Doebel.

Personally, and professionally, Doebel is grateful for the collaboration with Lillard. “Angeline has been a major mentor for me — it means a lot to have a relationship with her. We have published together previously, and we are always thinking about new project ideas that could lead to external funding. This likely never would have happened if not for 4-VA,” Doebel concludes.

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.”

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.”

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 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.”

4-VA@Mason Funding Smartphone App to Support Transfer Students

Over the past 10 years, 4-VA@Mason has bolstered efforts to smooth the transition for first-generation transfer students from NOVA to Mason via roles in ADVANCE, developing the Bachelor of Applied Science program, and aligning course subject content and objectives between NOVA and Mason. It was natural, then, for 4-VA@Mason to step in to fund a proposal for a novel smartphone-based augmented reality campus tour of Mason to help traditionally underserved transfer students.

The concept is being led by Kelly Schrum, a professor in Mason’s Higher Education Program in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. Schrum has brought together a group of faculty members, undergraduate, and graduate students to put the plan into action. In addition, representatives from ADVANCE, the Office of Undergraduate Admissions, and the First-Gen+ Center will also play a role in the project.

After reviewing the considerable research on common challenges facing transfer students, including the need to feel connected and find community, the group is developing a prototype of the app for prospective students to download. “After much research, we believe that an app of this type can go a long way to help make our transfer students more comfortable in the new Mason environment,” explains Schrum. “We are so pleased with the initial enthusiastic reception from students as well as our partners in this effort.”

Through the app, students will ‘meet’ a virtual character — wearing a First Gen Mason T-shirt — who welcomes them to Mason. Students will see a virtual panel where they will find questions and answers from current students and be invited to add their voice to the conversation. Encouraging words from the First Gen+ Center will appear on the screen, such as “You are the first, but you won’t be the last.”

The virtual character will encourage the student to walk toward the Johnson Center where a simulated First Gen+ table is set up for an ice cream social. The student will create a sundae — with Mason colors — while interacting with the character who will share fun facts about Mason regarding first gen transfer students and provide an overview of events and activities hosted by the First Gen+ Center. The student can ask questions, powered by a chatbot, and can also submit more personalized or in-depth questions that will be directed to the right department, such as Admissions or Success Coaching, all designed to make the students more comfortable with campus and their fellow students.

The prototype is being tested this winter with prospective students in coordination with ADVANCE. The Admissions office will distribute flyers about the app, place them in bags for transfer students, and highlight the app on transfer student tours.

“This is a great opportunity to help our new transfer students feel more comfortable with their transition to Mason, and get them off to the right start,” says Janette Muir, Vice Provost, Academic Affairs and 4-VA@Mason Campus Coordinator.

Following the beta testing, Schrum’s team will collect and analyze data with the goal of improving and expanding the prototype, contributing to scholarly research on using technology to improve student success, and applying for external funding.

Mason Study Aims to Reduce Avian Window Collision Mortality

Ornithologists, ecologists, environmentalists in the Mason Nation, and many others will welcome the findings of one of the most expansive survey-based studies to date designed to reduce avian window collision mortality. Avian window collisions are a national concern, with estimates of avian mortality between 300 million to one billion birds every year in the United States. The investigation, conducted over the past 12 months on multiple Mason campuses, was led by Biology Professor Daniel Hanley and his co-PI David Luther, with support from collaborator John Swaddle at William and Mary. Most significantly, the study has identified a critical factor — the gloss of the windows – as playing a significant role in avian window collisions and is the first research of its kind to make this important link.

The study was funded with a grant from 4-VA@Mason, as part of 4-VA’s commitment to help launch pilot explorations which support collaborations of faculty in higher education throughout the commonwealth. The 4-VA research also encourages opportunities for student research that can make a positive difference for Virginia and beyond.

Jamison teaches students about window strikes at a volunteer event on the Fairfax campus

Smith distributes information to raise awareness about the project at one of two events he led during Global Bird Rescue Week.

Hanley explains, “Through a large-scale Mason community effort, we conducted one of the most comprehensive investigations on this subject. We completed 3,415 surveys across multiple Mason campuses — 3,017 on the main Fairfax campus alone — and found 82 total fatal collisions, with 62 at the Fairfax campus.” The surveys were undertaken by a team of more than 40 volunteer undergraduate students under the direction of graduate students Quentin Jamison and Shawn Smith.

“On our Fairfax campus, the strikes were not clustered in any particular area. Instead, we found that certain buildings were more problematic than others. Not surprisingly, buildings with greater glass coverage experienced more fatal window strikes, as this has been documented before,” notes Hanley.

Smith documents a window strike mortality event during a citizen science walk.

Smith shares avian insights with volunteers using the Lab’s teaching collection.

The researchers recorded the abundance of window strikes within the campus interior. Horizon Hall and Southside posed the greatest risk on the Fairfax campus, however, Exploratory and Thompson Halls also had a large number of strikes.

The core of the study considered the reflective properties of windows on 34 buildings as well as the proportion of glass on each side of these buildings. The team implemented a model to determine which factor could predict the count of fatal avian window strikes. “We used high-end glossmeters — Rhopoint IQ — to quantify the degree to which the glass reflects light and images to on-coming birds. There have been very few studies that have experimentally measured these features of glass. Therefore, our study provides a critical baseline for future endeavors in this field,” says Hanley.

The team coordinated with Mason Facilities, the Patriot Green Fund, and other interested parties. Further, they aligned with researchers and students at Virginia Tech, Radford, Bridgewater College, and William & Mary who are tracking fatal window collisions on their campuses. Additionally, outside organizations including the Virginia Master Naturalists and the Virginia Chapter of The Wildlife Society participated. Through this 4-VA supported research, PIs Hanley and Luther aim to greatly reduce window strikes throughout Mason campuses.

Jamison presented the project at the 2023 annual meeting of The Wildlife Society’s Virginia Chapter.

Graduate student researcher Jamison presented preliminary study results at the annual winter meeting of the Virginia Chapter of the Wildlife Society and, as a result, the group is now building a consortium on causes of window strikes and methods of reduction among researchers at the other universities in Virginia. Jamison presented at the American Ornithological Society conference in Ontario, Canada this summer as well.

Jamison at the American Ornithological conference.

There’s more to come. “We have a draft manuscript on the topic, in collaboration with Dr. Swaddle from William and Mary, which will be submitted to a peer reviewed journal later this year,” notes Hanley. “We are now focusing on the sensory perception aspect of avian vision and understanding how birds see the glass (or not) while flying in order to design methods to make the glass more obvious to the birds so that collisions are reduced.” This research could result in external funding from energy companies and developers to install avian collision avoidance systems on their infrastructures — wind turbines, power lines, transformers, and buildings.

More than forty undergraduate students participated on the project, including: Aaidah Nizumudeen, Aaron Amin, Aaron Morton, Alexander Perez, Amal Ahmad, Ari Masters, Carolina Sanabria, Caroline Tate, Caty McVicker, Chloe Fowler, Deena Chouf, Eatha Lynch, Elham Sarangi, Emily Le Bron, Grace Rapoza, Grace Shimizu, Holly Haw, Hye Jeong Kim, Jessica Winey, Jordan Bertaux, Jordan Davis, Kaitlyn Moore, Kate Mateyka, Katie Russel, Kennedy Ream, Kiersten Jewell, Maddy Gonzalez, Merri Collins, Mohammad Alaadhab, Morgan O’Donnel, Natali Walker, Nibal Negib, Nimra Kashif, Quinn Griffin, Raina Saha, Ruth Leilago, Sameer Jame, Sara Abarra, Sarah Weikel, Trent Gasso, and Zahra Slimani.

Virginia Tech undergraduate students Madeline Alt and Rachel Morse also shared expertise from years of surveys on their campus.

“We couldn’t have pulled all this together without the 4-VA@Mason funding,” concludes Hanley. “This was a significant undertaking, and we needed the time and space to get this done right. We believe this is just the beginning of what we hope will be a turning point in reducing avian collision mortality.”